The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
AI tools that can have humanlike discussions coming to Slack
New artificial intelligence tools that can have humanlike conversations, create images and answer complex questions have popped up rapidly over the past year. Now they’re coming to Slack.
Business software giant Salesforce, which bought the office communication app in 2021, announced a deal Tuesday with CHATGPT maker Openai to bring the company’s chatbot technology into Salesforce’s products. Inside Slack, the bot will be able to summarize conversations, draft replies and help users research topics.
The tech artificial intelligence technology will also be integrated into Salesforce’s sales software, which is used by tens of thousands of companies and organizations to market and sell products.
The deal is the latest in a stampede as tech companies seek to deploy “generative AI tech” into their products. Microsoft announced a multibillion dollar deal with Openai in January to use its tech to answer questions directly in its Bing search engine, while Google has said its bot, called Bard, will be available to the public soon, too. Proponents of the tech say the chatbots will revolutionize how people interact with computers and software, while skeptics point out that the bots make glaring mistakes.
Nevertheless, there’s a flurry of new product announcements and deals with AI companies, especially Openai. Salesforce’s announcement comes one day after Microsoft said it would put CHATGPT into its products that compete directly with Salesforce’s.
Microsoft has already added chatbots to some versions of its Slack competitor, Teams.