ChatGPT is coming to Slack

By CNN

Published February 17, 2023 9:42 am

CNN

By Jennifer Korn

Next time you’re wondering how to respond to a colleague on Slack, you may be able to ask ChatGPT for help.

Salesforce, the company behind Slack, announced Tuesday that it’s partnering with OpenAI to launch a ChatGPT app for the workplace messaging platform. The new tool will use the AI chatbot to “deliver instant conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance directly in Slack,” according to Salesforce.

“There couldn’t be a more natural fit,” Noah Desai Weiss, Slack’s chief product officer, wrote in the release.

Workers will be able to use the tech to get instantaneous summaries of conversations, as well as tools to assist in faster research and help with drafting messages to coworkers. The tool will pull from information found within Slack’s channel archives as well as the vast trove of online data that ChatGPT has been trained on.

The tool is currently in beta testing. Companies interested in joining can fill out a form through the website of ChatGPT creator OpenAI to be added to the waitlist.

The move to bring ChatGPT to Slack is just the latest example of the AI chatbot finding its way into more services. Last week, OpenAI opened up access to the tool to third-party businesses. Instacart, Snap and tutor app Quizlet were among the early partners experimenting with adding ChatGPT.

OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT in late November and stunned many users with the tool’s impressive ability to generate original essays, stories and song lyrics in response to user prompts. The initial wave of attention on the tool helped renew an arms race among tech companies to develop and deploy similar AI tools in their products.

Microsoft recently unveiled an AI-powered revamp of Bing powered by technology from OpenAI. Later this month, Microsoft is set to hold another event to discuss how AI could help with “reinventing productivity” and “the future of work.”

But the slack integration could be one of the biggest real world tests yet not just for whether ChatGPT can be entertaining, but also whether it can live up to the promise of making people more productive. It may also test the risks of professionals relying on AI chatbot tools, which have shared inaccurate or incendiary responses, in a workplace setting.

CNN’s Samantha Kelly contributed to this report.

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