Salesforce, Slack’s parent company, trialed the AI assistant internally prior to launch, with 25,000 weekly active users in just a few weeks “through word of mouth,” said Seaman. “We didn’t do any in-product nudging.”
Seaman highlighted some of the ways the AI assistant has been used by the Slack product engineering team. Before a recent all-hands meeting, for instance, he asked Slackbot check the meeting deck and provide guidance on how to pronounce the names of more than 60 new hires. The AI assistant has also been used to collate product development feedback from a Slack channel.
“In seconds, I have a summarized view of the feedback — positive and negative — which would have taken a product manager hours or maybe a week historically,” he said. Slackbot then turned the feedback into a product brief and a sprint plan, creating canvas documents with information for the engineering team, he said. And sales teams at the company used Slackbot to get a quick rundown of clients they haven’t spoken to yet in relation to a particular product.
