Slack adds Slackforce Surfaces to build interactive tools inside chats

In short: Slack is launching Slackforce Surfaces, a feature that lets Slackbot create interactive dashboards, reports, polls, and other tools inside Slack chats based on what you ask for.

What happened

Slack announced a new feature called Slackforce Surfaces. It is designed to let people build interactive items like reports, polls, dashboards, presentations, and small internal web pages without leaving Slack.

The idea is simple. You describe what you want to Slackbot, and Slackbot uses AI (software that tries to follow instructions in a human-like way) to put it together. Slack says the tool can pull information from relevant Slack conversations and from connected apps such as Google Drive or Salesforce.

After Slackbot creates a “Surface,” you can share it with coworkers and pin it to a channel so it stays easy to find. Other people can open it, interact with it, and leave comments. Slack shared an example where a user asked for an arcade-themed chart showing AI token usage, and Slackbot generated an interactive dashboard that broke usage down by teams like sales, design, and engineering.

Slack says Surfaces will only pull information that a workspace has given Slack’s AI tools permission to access.

Slackforce Surfaces will be available to all Slack customers, including free users, as long as Slackbot is enabled. Slack says live data support is coming in October.

Why it matters

Many teams use Slack as their main place for day-to-day work discussions. Surfaces aims to reduce the back-and-forth of copying information into other tools, like making a chart in a separate app. It is like asking a helpful coworker to turn a messy conversation into a neat, shareable page that the whole team can use in the same place.

Source: The Verge AI