Dive Brief:
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To remedy the sometimes overwhelming influx of messages on its communication platform, Slack is using AI and ML to organize received messages by importance, reports MIT Technology Review.
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The live features include showing where and how often a topic is conversed. Once the AI system identifies those discussion details, employees can search for coworkers with the most expertise on the subject matter. Last year, the feature made searches 50% better.
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Developers used a "work graph" to examine the companies that use Slack and analyze "how the people within them are interrelated, where in the app their discussions are taking place and what topics are being discussed," according to the report. The work graph is a similar method used by Google and Facebook, but unlike Slack, those companies use the graph to analyze the "global network of relationships," not just that of a single business.
Dive Insight:
Slack currently boasts a user base of 50,000 companies and is often credited with pioneering the enterprise-based communication platform market.
Though Slack's user base is relatively small to the market's newcomers like Microsoft and Facebook, it is still widely regarded as "innovative." After all, Slack does not have the same type of access points as Microsoft's software suite or Facebook, which brings familiarity from employees' personal lives.
All major contenders in this market have the goal of outperforming email, which remains the most prominent and preferred method of digital communication in the enterprise. Employees often feel privacy is more protected with email.
Even though Slack is working toward better organization of messages on its platforms, some employees are left "annoyed" because platform "rules" are easily disregarded by coworkers, such as sending messages despite a "do not disturb" status.