Slack Hopes Its AI Will Keep You from Hating Slack

The fastest-growing business app is relying on machine-learning tricks to fend off a deluge of messages — as well as competition from Facebook and Microsoft.

by Elizabeth Woyke

If you work at one of the 50,000 companies that pay to use Slack for workplace collaboration, you probably spend hours on it, swapping information, bantering, and sharing files with your colleagues. It’s a casual, flexible way to interact — you tap out brief messages in group chat rooms (called channels) instead of sending e-mail, and it feels more like a smartphone app than typical office software.

But while it can be an efficient way to collaborate, keeping up with Slack can become a full-time task, particularly when you return from a few days away and find thousands of status updates, scattered across dozens of channels. Slack estimates that the average user sends 70 messages per day. How can you know which are must-reads and which can be skipped?

Slack’s solution: artificial intelligence. In early 2016, the startup hired Stanford-trained computer scientist Noah Weiss to make the platform smarter and more useful. Over the past year and a half, Weiss’s group has used machine learning to enable faster…