If your team is like most, Slack is your digital office. It’s where conversations happen, decisions get made, and projects move forward. So when Slack announced its own set of AI tools, it made perfect sense. They’ve built Slack AI right into the platform, aiming to make your workday a bit smoother.
This post will give you an honest look at what Slack AI can do in 2025. We’ll go through its main features, check out how it helps with day-to-day productivity, and talk frankly about where it falls short. You’ll get a clear picture of its strengths and understand why you might need a more specialized AI tool, especially if you’re running a customer service or IT support team.
What is Slack AI?
So, what’s the deal with Slack AI? Put simply, it’s a handful of generative AI tools that live inside the Slack you already know. You don’t need to install a separate app or juggle another browser tab. The main goal is to help you save time, dig up information faster, and make sense of the knowledge hidden in your company’s endless chat logs.
The whole idea behind Slack AI is that your past conversations are a treasure trove of useful information. It leverages that history to power its key abilities:
- Finding answers: You can ask questions in normal language instead of just guessing keywords.
- **Getting summaries:** You can get the short version of long channels or threads without reading every last message.
- Building simple automations: You can create basic workflows just by describing what you want them to do.
It’s like having a smart assistant right inside Slack, helping you tap into your team’s shared brain.
Core features of Slack AI explained
Let’s get into what Slack AI actually does. These features are meant to blend into your daily routine without you having to learn a whole new system.
AI-powered search and answers
The old search bar had us all playing a guessing game with keywords, hoping for the best. Slack AI changes this. Now, you can just ask a question like you would a coworker, such as, “What is project phoenix?” or “Who is leading the Q3 marketing campaign?”
The AI doesn’t just show you a list of messages. It pulls together a quick answer and provides citations, linking you directly to the messages, files, or canvases where it found the info. While its Enterprise Search feature can link to external apps like Google Drive, it’s more about finding and linking to documents than it is about understanding what’s inside them.
A user asks a question and receives an answer from the Slack AI search feature.
Conversation summaries and channel recaps
Staring at a wall of unread messages? This is where Slack AI can be a real help. It gives you a few ways to catch up quickly:
- Thread summaries: With a single click, you can get the highlights from a long, confusing thread.
- Channel summaries: Get a rundown of everything you’ve missed in a channel, whether it’s just your unread messages, the last week’s activity, or a specific date range you choose.
- Recaps: You can set up a daily digest for your most important channels, giving you a personalized “what you missed” briefing each morning.
These are incredibly handy for getting back up to speed after a vacation, jumping into a new project, or just surviving in a busy channel.
Slack AI conversation summaries feature.
AI-powered workflow builder
In the past, building automations meant you needed a bit of technical skill. With AI in Workflow Builder, you can just describe the task. For instance, you could type, “Welcome new members to the #onboarding channel and ask them to introduce themselves,” and Slack AI will sketch out the workflow for you.
You can also use a “Summarize public channel” step in your automations, which is perfect for creating weekly reports or project updates without any manual copy-pasting.
The AI-powered workflow builder in Slack AI.
A key limitation of Slack AI: It only knows what’s in Slack
While these features are great for getting a handle on information inside Slack, they hit a wall when the answers you need are stored somewhere else. What about the critical info in your help desk like Zendesk or Freshdesk? Or your official guides in Confluence?
Slack AI isn’t set up to connect all these different knowledge sources to solve tricky, customer-facing problems. This is the main gap that a tool like eesel.ai is designed to fill. It acts as a central knowledge hub, connecting to all your company’s information from help desks to wikis to chat tools to give you complete answers, not just summaries of what people have chatted about.
The 'walled garden' knowledge limitation of Slack AI compared to an integrated AI platform.
Practical Slack AI use cases and workflows
To make this more concrete, here are a few real-world scenarios where Slack AI can help, focusing on its main strength: making internal teams more productive.
Onboarding new team members with Slack AI
Let’s say a new developer joins your #dev-team channel. Instead of bothering a senior engineer with basic questions, they can ask Slack AI, “What are our coding standards for Python?” or “Who is the lead on the mobile app refresh?” They get answers right away and can start contributing much faster, all without interrupting someone else’s work.
Automating project management updates with Slack AI
A project manager can create a workflow that automatically summarizes the #proj-campaign-launch channel every Friday afternoon. That summary then gets posted in the #marketing-leads channel. This keeps all the stakeholders informed without anyone having to manually write up a report or sit through another status meeting.
How Slack AI automates project management updates.
Improving incident response coordination with Slack AI
When a technical issue flares up, the related Slack channel can get chaotic. A support engineer who joins mid-crisis can use the “Summarize thread” feature to get a quick brief on the problem, what’s been tried so far, and who is doing what. This lets them jump in and start helping immediately.
The Slack AI workflow limitation: Reporting vs. resolving
Do you see the pattern here? These workflows are great for reporting on and summarizing information that’s already in Slack. They aren’t built to actually do anything with it in other systems.
Slack AI can’t hop into Zendesk to triage a customer ticket. It can’t check an order status in your Shopify admin. And it can’t assign a critical IT issue in Jira. Its abilities are stuck inside Slack.
In contrast, tools like eesel AI’s AI Agents are built to operate outside that box. You can teach them real actions, so they don’t just find information but actually resolve issues directly in your other apps. They can tag a ticket, update a customer record, or escalate an issue, turning information into action.
Comparing the reporting function of Slack AI to the resolution capabilities of eesel AI.
Slack AI limitations and pricing: what support leaders need to know
If you’re leading a support or IT team, Slack AI might seem like a good idea on the surface. But it’s really important to understand its limits before you commit.
Slack AI Limitation 1: The “walled garden” knowledge problem
For a support agent, the answer to a customer’s question is rarely hiding in a random Slack channel. It’s in past tickets, official help center articles, developer docs, or a Notion database. Because Slack AI leans so heavily on chat history, it’s essentially flying blind to your most valuable and up-to-date knowledge sources. It’s like trying to answer customer questions without reading the instruction manual. This makes it a poor fit for delivering the kind of reliable, thorough support that customers expect.
Slack AI Limitation 2: No specialized support controls
When you’re dealing with customers, you can’t just wing it. You need control over the AI’s tone, strict rules for when it should hand off to a human, and guardrails to prevent it from giving out wrong or incomplete answers.
Slack AI is a general productivity tool, not a specialized support one. It doesn’t have the fine-tuned controls and human-in-the-loop features that are essential for any customer-facing automation. For example, you can’t tell it to “always escalate questions about refunds” or “use a more empathetic tone for angry customers.”
This is exactly what eesel AI was built for. It lets you shape a bot’s personality and behavior with simple instructions. You can set clear rules for what it can and can’t do, and even test it on your past tickets to see how it will behave before it ever interacts with a real customer.
Specialized support controls that are missing from Slack AI.
Slack AI pricing
Slack AI isn’t included in the standard package. It’s a paid add-on available for all paid Slack plans (Pro, Business+, and Enterprise). This means you’re paying extra for a tool that, while helpful for internal chats, doesn’t address the main challenges of a modern support or IT team. For many, it’s an investment in a tool that only gets you halfway there.
Feature comparison: Slack AI vs. eesel AI for support automation
Here’s a simple table to show where each platform stands when it comes to actual support automation.
| Feature | Slack AI | eesel AI |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Use Case | Internal Productivity & Knowledge Search | Customer & Employee Support Automation |
| Knowledge Sources | Primarily Slack conversations, files, canvases. Limited external search. | All sources: Help desks, Confluence, GDocs, Notion, Shopify, past tickets, etc. |
| AI Actions | Limited to Slack (e.g., send message, create channel) | External Actions: Tag/close tickets, API calls, update CRM, look up orders. |
| Customization | General user preferences | Fine-grained control over tone, behavior, escalation paths per bot. |
| Target User | All desk workers | Support Leaders, IT Managers, CX Ops |
| Setup Approach | Built-in, turn on. | Layered on top of existing tools, no migration needed. |
Is Slack AI the right tool for your team?
So, what’s the verdict? Slack AI is a great addition to the platform for its intended purpose: making internal teams more productive and surfacing knowledge from past conversations. It’s a solid internal assistant that helps people work smarter together.
But when it comes to specialized, high-stakes jobs like customer service or IT support, its limitations are obvious. It’s stuck in its own “walled garden,” unable to get information from or take action in the other tools where your team does its most important work. It’s a helpful summarizer, but it’s not an autonomous support agent.
If your real goal is to automate resolutions, connect knowledge from all your business tools, and offer great support around the clock, you’ll need a solution that was built specifically for that.
Supercharge your support with AI that works everywhere
If your support team is being held back by Slack AI’s limitations, it might be time to look at a platform that’s designed to work across your entire tool stack. eesel AI connects to Slack, your help desk, and all your other knowledge sources to provide instant, accurate answers and automate resolutions right where your team and customers already are.
Book a demo or start for free to see how you can unify your knowledge and automate support in minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Slack AI is a paid add-on and is not included in the standard Pro, Business+, or Enterprise plans. You must purchase it separately for your organization to access its features.
It excels at internal productivity tasks. Its main strengths are summarizing long conversations, getting recaps of channels, and finding answers to questions based on knowledge that already exists within your Slack workspace.
The primary limitation is that its knowledge is almost entirely restricted to information within Slack. It cannot access crucial data from external sources like your help desk or official documentation, which is essential for accurate customer support.
No, its actions are confined to the Slack environment. It can post summaries or create simple workflows within Slack, but it cannot perform tasks in external applications like triaging a ticket in Jira or updating a customer record in a CRM.
