Slack Unveils Feature for Creating Interactive Charts and Reports in Chats
Slack has introduced a new feature called Slackforce Surfaces, allowing users to create interactive tools like reports, polls, and dashboards directly within a chat. By simply describing their needs, users can prompt Slackbot to generate these tools using AI technology that extracts relevant data from active conversations and integrated applications such as Google Drive and Salesforce.
The generated tools, referred to as Surfaces, can be easily shared with colleagues and pinned within channels for further interaction and commentary. An example provided by Slack showcases a scenario where a user instructs Slackbot to produce an arcade-themed dashboard displaying AI token usage across various departments including sales, design, and engineering.
Ryan Gavin, Slack’s chief marketing officer, explained the benefit of this feature saying, “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.”
This significant update follows Slack’s earlier modifications to Slackbot, enhancing its capabilities into a more robust AI assistant. These upgrades, made just months ago, include features like summarising channel information, sorting messages, and coordinating meeting schedules. In addition, collaborative vibe coding channels were introduced in the past month.
Slackforce Surfaces provides a versatile range of uses, such as creating a dynamic customer support queue dashboard or designing a financial forecast with weather-themed visuals. It’s important to note that the feature only accesses information that users have permitted the AI to use.
The Slackforce Surfaces feature is available to all Slack customers, even those on a free plan, as long as Slackbot is enabled in the workspace. Users will have the capability to engage with live data using this feature starting in October.
Reporting based on coverage first published by theverge.com.