Boost Productivity with Generative AI in Slack | Dreamforce 2023 | Salesforce

We're now in a world where AI can not only help you do work, but it'll help you think better. And what I mean by that is that it's able to help you unlock mental agility, the ability to think faster and more clearly in the moment, using the knowledge and expertise that you uniquely hold. It's about amplifying your strengths and automating away all the busy work. My name's Lauren Gill and I'm here to share how you can unlock this type of mental agility and boost productivity with AI in Slack. If you take a look here, this is probably what many of you all feel like. Every day your workday is fractured. One moment you might be in a Google Doc reviewing comments, the next you might be in an Asana task updating statuses. And then you're over to your inbox to respond to customer email. And it's not just your systems either. Your team needs your help too. You've got people who are pinging you about feedback on a decision, or they need you to approve a purchase order, or they might need your help answering a ticket. The list goes on. In all of this sea and all of this noise, who is left to be the glue that keeps all this work together across your people and your tools? It's you, it's me, it's all of us. Each of us are individually playing mental gymnastics to day after day, just trying to keep the tools and people together and move work forward. In fact, in recent research, knowledge workers were reported to spend on average 2.4 hours just looking for information to do their basic jobs. And this means that they're making decisions without critical context. So by way of that, nearly a third of them had admitted that they had made a mistake or they made a wrong decision simply because they weren't aware of information. So knowledge overload and information silos aren't just unproductive or time consuming or frustrating. They're having a real impact on business decisions. And there has to be a better way to work. And that's where Slack comes in. Slack is your intelligent productivity platform designed to help you break out of these outdated ways of working and embrace new ones. It empowers teams to use AI and automation in their flow of work in order to deliver on their company's most top priorities. And more importantly, it's productivity with a purpose. And that means teams are aligned and focused and working towards one shared goal, instead of wasting time switching between tools and operating on fragmented views of work. And what makes Slack different than other productivity tools out There. And how will we be able to deliver this type of productivity? Well, it's because we're aware work gets streamlined across your people, data and tools all in one place. And what that means is not only knowledge gets aggregated, but it means that as each of us as individuals, we have one place to spend our mental energy and focus. And that's huge when it comes to context switching. That usually has to happen when you think about other productivity tools that exist. They're often great for tracking work, but you often have to supplement them with other communication tools like chat or email. And then when you think about email, email's often just a chronological feed. It's coming as it comes in and you have to decide as the filter what is most important. What project does this relate to? What team does it relate to? And that's all on you. But in Slack, we're able to do all of that on your behalf through channels. Channels organize work across every team, topic and subject and makes sure that you have one source of truth for work that's happening across the organization and your different tools. And this in turn creates a treasure trove of knowledge about your business that truly understands the way you work because it's grounded in communication. It's not just a static document or an email sent one off, but it's truly a chronicling of work from start to finish. And that rich data means that you're able to tap into knowledge across the organization in a way that wasn't possible before. So for example, say I'm a sales rep and I'm onboarding to a new territory of accounts. Typically this means that I have to do a lot of knowledge transfer with the previous sales rep. I got to get up to speed on what's most important from their perspective. I have to read up on documents and all of that is time taken away from me supporting my customer. But in Slack, sales teams operate in account channels and account channels are the source of truth where all the team comes together to deliver on that customer. There's quarterly business reviews in theirs, there's escalations when there's issues, there's, there's all of the strategies of the cross functional team coming together for that particular customer. And as a sales rep, that means that rich archive of knowledge is accessible to you too. So all of that data that's been housed together since the moment a customer was onboarded to Slack is now available for the next sales rep and the next sales rep to benefit from and get that deeper understanding of the customer. And then say, you're that same sales rep trying to support a customer who's dealing with who's affected by an incident. Usually incident are happening across different tools. And as a sales rep, you don't even have visibility into what's happening. You don't have the licenses or the access to those tools. But in Slack, incidents happen in one channel. And again, that means all of the responders and the cross functional teams are coming together in one place to resolve this issue in real time. And as a sales rep, that means you can tap into that real time context and figure out what's going on with this incident and what you need to report back to your customer. And, and that means you're able to instill confidence in that customer that you've got it handled and that you'll update them when everything's resolved. And those are just two examples of how channels are incredibly powerful at capturing real time context and historical context across your organization. And now with the power of generative AI, there's going to be so much more you can do with that knowledge. And we're here to help unlock the full potential of it. When you think about that rich archive of unstructured conversational data, that's a goldmine for generative AI to make sense of all of that and turn it into insights that your employees can use to do work better. And because Slack is where work is already happening, you're not being asked to switch to another tool. You're able to actually get those generative AI boosts of productivity in your existing flow of work. You don't have to learn how to be a prompt engineer or know how to refine how to use AI. Generative AI is actually embedded seamlessly throughout the user experience, so, so you don't have to think about that. And then lastly, it's built on a secure trusted foundation. So for many of you all who are already Slack customers, Slack AI is going to be built on top of our same infrastructure, coming with the same security and compliance that you already get from our core product. So it really simplifies that security conversation and helps give peace of mind. And so this is all coming together with what we're calling Slack AI. Slack AI is going to bring generative AI directly into the user experience. It's going to help you unlock all of those insights from the knowledge across your entire organization on a platform where work is already getting done. So instead of talking about it, I'm going to walk through a quick demo of what that might look like in practice. So I got added to a project midway through and I've got a lot to catch up on. But the good news is that I've been added in a number of channels that I can look at in order to get up to speed. But that'll take a while for me to read through all the channels. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Slack Search and just simply ask what's going on with this particular project? What are the most important things that I need to know in order to jump into the project and get onboarded faster. And as you can see here, there's already a list of search results that you already get from Slack Search. But on top of it there's that summary getting generated by Slack AI and it's basically taking all of that knowledge that's been aggregated through search and delivering one bite sized answer. So I can already see there's context across multiple channels being pulled together in this answer and I can understand what the project is about, who's involved and even some of the team processes that are associated with it. So now that I have that understanding, I got a sense of the project, I'm ready to go back to the channel and take a deeper look at the actual project that's being done. And I can see in the team channel there's already been a lot of activity. People are talking about the work practices and how we're going to collaborate and team milestones and that's a lot for me to have to catch up on. But there's no worries because Slack AI can help me here too. It can take a look at all of the conversations that are happening and help distill it down to one succinct summary so I get the most important information. So here we are, Slack AI is doing the work, taking a look at the messages from the past seven days and using Generative AI to produce that summary so that I can get the most important details up front. And in just a moment here you'll see that the summary is going to pop up. And I can see that there are already key details pulled out by Generative AI. I can see the people who are involved in the project, maybe they're people I've never worked with before. I can take a look at their profiles. I can also see that there are sources which are so critical so that I trust that this summary is accurate. And I can also go deeper if I need to on certain areas of the summary. And so all of this is super valuable in helping me get up to speed and understand what's happening in this particular channel, but I also see that I'm tagged into the team stand up channel and this is where the team is giving up to date reports on what they're working on. Each individual person sharing their latest status and progress towards this project's goal. And it's a lot of great context for me because I can actually get a sense of who are the key players in this project and what type of work are they doing. And with the help of Slack AI, what I can actually do is take all of that stand up messages and turn it into a digest, a roll up of all of the work that's happening across the team. And not only is that helpful for me as someone who's new, but imagine if you're a project manager or a team manager, these types of recaps can be repurposed into status updates so that you don't have to do that heavy lifting of writing them yourself. So that is the power of Slack AI. It's being able to take all of the knowledge and information happening in real time and helping you being able to get up to speed. I let the team know I'm onboarding, I'm going to be up to speed quickly and then I'm ready to move on with my day. And we're really excited that Slack AI will make this possible. And I'm going to share a few other examples of how these features might be put to work. So we talked about channel recaps and how I used it to catch up on a team channel. Another example might be that same incident channel. Imagine that you've got the team who spent hours and hours poring over an incident trying to get it resolved. And at the end of it, there's someone who's on call to write that root cause analysis. They're going to have to document what happened and what the team learned for posterity. But now with channel recaps, imagine using that to summarize the entire incident channel and use that summary as a draft for that RCA report so that you don't have to do that work yourself. And then of course, we all have been there where you're catching up on PTO and you've got channels and channels waiting for you to catch up on. For me personally, I have a section in my sidebar that's full of my highest priority projects. So the first five minutes, when I get back to work from pto, I take a look at those channels and create those channel recaps so that already within a few minutes I have the most up to date important information about the projects that need my attention the most. And then when it comes to thread summaries, where they're a little bit different than channel recaps, is that they're often unfolding in real time. So channels are great whether you want to take a look at the archive or you want to pop in and see what's going on. But oftentimes if you're tagged in a thread, it's because someone needs your help in the moment and you're on the hook to catch up, figure out what they need and respond in a timely manner. And now with thread summaries, you'll be able to catch up on those threads in just one click. And another really valuable use case for these would be imagine the team been going back and forth, they've been discussing or brainstorming, and at the end of it, each one of you have a version of events of where you think the team landed when it came to key decisions. But with Slack AI, it becomes this third party, unbiased source that takes all of the discussion and spits out the summary key decisions, key action items. And make sure the team is on the same page and aligned on moving. And then lastly, we have search answers. So search answers are again about tapping into the valuable repository of knowledge that already exists in Slack. And I showed you how you might be able to get up to speed on a project. But another amazing use case is that Slack is actually where a lot of informal processes take place. You might be having a team stand up like I just showed you, or you might use a workflow to submit a request. And these are processes that often go undocumented. They're almost like unwritten norms that you learn about by context clues, by looking at a channel, or because someone told you. But in Slack, with Slack AI, you'd be able to ask that plain simple question saying, how does the engineering team usually handle daily standups? And you'll be able to get an answer with that context so that you know how the team operates and you won't have to bother your teammates either. And then lastly, if you think about all of the knowledge that has spanned across your organization, Slack has had our workspace for over a decade. You can scroll back to the very first message that our CEO and co founder wrote when it was just a startup. Imagine how much knowledge that exists in your respective workspaces that could be tapped into with this type of sear. You don't need to know what you're looking for, you just need to know the question that you have and you'll get that answer immediately. And we know that none of this means much. You know, it can be so valuable, but if it's not something that your organization can trust, there's not really much value in it at all. And this is the group of people right here who are in charge often of making sure AI is secured for your organization. And the great news is that we built Slack AI from the ground up to meet security and compliance by default. And how that really works is that Slack AI is running on our secure infrastructure. That means there's not a third party language model at play. Everything is housed within Slack. Your data stays in Slack and that has huge benefits. For example, if you've ever looked at other generative AI tools and you've worried about things like data leakage or maybe data cross contamination across multiple sources, that's something that's not really an issue in Slack because it's your Slack data and it's housed within our infrastructure and is using that large language model that's also part of it as well. So that peace of mind hopefully will give you the confidence to be able to empower your team to use Slack AI to be more productive. So that was just a quick look at what the power of Slack AI can do in order to help you be more productive. And I want you to think back to the very beginning of this presentation where I shared that slide where there was a systems and people coming together and that's how work feels like today. But with Slack AI we'll be able to cut through all of that noise and help you focus on the most important information so that not only are you able to get up to speed faster, but you're spending more time doing the strategic critical thinking that only you can do. I encourage you to take a look at this QR code here and sign up for our wait list. We just announced the wait list last week and we're excited to onboard new customers and continue to learn from your feedback. Thank you. And for those of you here, I wanted to just point out a few other things that are going on. We've got the Slack keynote tomorrow. It's on the last day of Dreamforce, so please make sure to attend. We'll have a demo of all of this, including our new innovations from our executive leadership team. We've also got the Slack Frontier where you can go to our demo booths for more one on one hands on interactions. And then I'm also leading a roundtable tomorrow and it's really about all of you learning from each other as peers. So it's not me talking at you like this, but I'll be facilitating a conversation amongst all of you about some of the biggest challenges organizations are facing with AI. Thank you.