Slack Enhances Chat with AI-Generated Surfaces

A new feature coming to Slack will allow you to build interactive reports, polls, dashboards, presentations, microsites, and other tools directly inside a chat. With Slackforce Surfaces, you can describe to Slackbot what you need, and it will use AI to gather information from relevant conversations and connected apps, like Google Drive or Salesforce, to create it. Once Slackbot creates a Surface, you can share it with colleagues and pin it to channels, allowing other people to view it, interact with it, and leave comments. In one example shared by Slack, a user asks Slackbot for help creating an arcade-themed visualization of AI token usage. The AI assistant then generates an interactive dashboard showing token usage across different divisions, such as sales, design, and engineering.  “You’re not exporting your data to some other tool to make sense of it, you’re asking Slackbot to build the dashboard, the deck, the report right where the conversation already is, and your whole team can act on it together,” Ryan Gavin, Slack’s chief marketing officer, tells The Verge in an email. [Video: Slack Surfaces] This update comes just months after Slack overhauled Slackbot to make the tool more like an AI assistant, allowing it to summarize information across channels, sort through messages, and find time to schedule meetings. It also added collaborative vibe coding channels last month. It seems like there are many other ways to use Surfaces, too, like building a live dashboard for a customer support queue that other workers can view, or creating a weather-themed financial forecast that pulls in data from connected apps. Slack notes that the feature will only pull information that you’ve given its AI tools permission to access. Slackforce Surfaces is available to all customers — including those who use it for free — with Slackbot enabled in their workspace. You’ll be able to use it with live data starting in October.