Slack as an Operating System? How AI Workflows Are Transforming Teams

As many workers already know, the abundance of workplace tools and systems can often feel overwhelming to keep track of. While the advent of powerful tech services and solutions has enabled employees to automate mundane activities and focus on essential work, finding the right balance is critical.

Slack may be viewed widely as a messaging platform, but an increasing number of enterprises are building everything from dashboards and workflows entirely inside Slack. For some, Slack is now a type of operating system in which systems can communicate with each other, and a range of processes run themselves. For example, the countless integrations with services like HubSpot, Zendesk and Salesforce give companies the capacity to move services from many different systems into one feed.

As far back as 2020, Slack and PagerDuty worked together to create a Slack app that can escalate and gather more information about different PagerDuty incidents and even run a custom PagerDuty incident response from a Slack notification. By allowing the creation of a Slack tool that can directly pull in data from PagerDuty, communications can be streamlined and the resolution can be found faster.

The growth of GenAI tools is also beneficial for utilising Slack as a type of operating system, as the development of this technology is expanding what Slack can offer to its users.

“We’ve already seen hints of the incredible productivity that generative AI (trained on public data) can unlock at work. The real power of this technology will be realised when companies’ AI tools can also analyse and act on the valuable knowledge that they’ve curated internally about their own customers, people and projects,” said Lidiane Jones, CEO, Slack.

From Productivity to Fulfilment

In practice, AI workflows can be built directly inside Slack, where AI agents can quickly summarise situations, pull from different external platforms to spot patterns in data that may be missed in isolation. While Slack remains the interface users deal with, a vast range of services underpin it and power every workflow. For this reason, it can be beneficial for some users to spend time working on Slack and how it can collaborate with other tools and platforms.

‘Each organisation needs its own “scientists” who are running experiments and studying the organisation. This has to be done together, because everything is symbiotic. It’s not about changing the individual, it’s about changing the team,’ said Leslie Perlow, the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership in the Organisational Behaviour Unit at Harvard Business School.