Slack CEO Insists Platform Will Excel in AI Race

• Lidiane Jones sees AI changing Slack’s language responses.
• Slack relies on third-party AI like Claude and ChatGPT.
• Future plans include personalized AI assistants.

The CEO of Slack, Lidiane Jones, who recently assumed a significant role in Silicon Valley, has emphasized the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the popular office chat platform. Her goal is to enhance the user experience.

After taking over as CEO of Slack in January, succeeding co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Lidiane Jones, a former Microsoft executive, is determined to ensure that Slack remains competitive with Microsoft.

Jones, who gained recognition during her tenure at Salesforce, assumed leadership of the company following its acquisition for $27.7 billion. Since then, she has been focused on accelerating Slack’s growth and bringing greater stability to the platform.

“It’s amazing what has happened to the world,” Jones said of this AI moment that has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley and the world.

“We’ve launched more features in the last nine months than in the several years before,” Brazilian-born and living in the Boston area, Jones said while speaking to an audience at San Francisco’s “Dreamforce”, Salesforce’s big annual event to plug its new products.

“When I got back from my two-week vacation this summer, I had mountains of messages from customers and colleagues to catch up on,” Jones said. “I asked ‘Slack AI’ to summarise everything and in two hours I was up to date, instead of spending a whole day, or even the week.”

“We’re quite different from Teams… We’re first and foremost a very open platform.”

Slack had previously criticized Microsoft for including Teams, which has 300 million monthly users, in its popular Office Suite. Despite Microsoft complying with Slack’s requests, the EU investigation continues, potentially leading to more regulatory consequences. However, Microsoft’s significant investments in OpenAI have given it a competitive advantage in the field of generative AI.

Jones, from Slack, argued that Slack is well-positioned to excel in AI due to the quality of its data, which is a crucial ingredient in AI’s success. She highlighted that Slack contains a company’s entire knowledge base, with staff collaborating across different departments, providing a wealth of unstructured data that enhances their AI capabilities through contextual understanding.

For now, Slack doesn’t have immediate plans to create its own language model, the core of generative AI that has made OpenAI famous. Jones humorously mentioned that they don’t see the need to reinvent the wheel, although they might consider developing a specialized model in the future.

Looking further into the future, Slack envisions the possibility of creating highly personalized AI assistants, akin to digital secretaries that know users on a deeply personal level. However, Jones acknowledged that building trust in such systems would require time, and they would need to address privacy concerns before pursuing such a goal.

Also Read

Nigeria: Digital Tech Helps Farmers Adapt to Climate Change

Climate adaptation: Tech aids farmers against climate issues. Productivity boost: Tech improves...

To stay informed about current events, please like our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/BOLUrduNews/.
Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/bolnewsurdu01 and stay updated with the latest news.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel https://bit.ly/3Tv8a3P to watch news from Pakistan and around the world