Slack CEO: How We’ll Use AI to Reduce Information Overload
More than six million people use Slack every day as a hub and platform for communicating and sharing information with their coworkers. The San Francisco–based company also just raised $250 million more in funding, in a round that puts its value at a lofty $5.1 billion (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2016: Slack”).
But new competitors—among them Microsoft Teams, Atlassian Stride, Google Hangouts Chat, and Workplace by Facebook—are pushing into the workplace-collaboration market, challenging Slack’s dominance and, in some cases, specifically marketing themselves as more productive options. During a trip to Boston, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield spoke to MIT Technology Review about the ways the company plans to use AI to keep people from feeling overwhelmed with data. Below is an edited excerpt from the interview.
Three and a half years after its public release, Slack continues to grow, but people have also started questioning how efficient it is as a workplace tool.
Well, the complaints that people have about modern office life are usually about not being in the loop, not understanding what decisions are being made, not being aware of what’s going on. That feeling of alienation [actually] gets reduced with Slack. If you work at a 10,000-person company and you’re using e-mail as the primary means of communication, then you probably have access to a couple hundredths of 1 percent of all the communications happening across the company. But if you use Slack you might have access to 10 or 20 percent.
The flip side is there’s a lot more information. We’ve already put in hundreds of little things that collectively reduce the impact of massive flows of information in Slack. For example, when you first start using Slack, we send you a notification for every new message, but shortly after, we prompt you and say, how about you switch to our recommended settings [that only notify you when you receive a direct message or your name or specified keywords are mentioned]. I think we can provide [even more] tools and human-centered design techniques to help people better navigate Slack without feeling overwhelmed.
Right, Slack established an AI and machine-learning division called Search, Learning & Intelligence early last year to reduce that “information avalanche.” Slack has already incorporated a few features that SLI developed. What are your specific goals for that group?
One of them is just [improving] search. Within search, there are two things. Basic keyword search, which is when people know that something exists and they want to find one specific thing. There’s also a more general kind of search, like learning about a topic. Most companies use some jargon or code names, which can be confusing, especially when you first arrive.
The second category [of goals for SLI] is proactive recommendations or alerts.
