Let’s be honest, getting a quick answer at work shouldn’t be a treasure hunt. Teams are getting tired of constantly switching tabs and digging through different apps just to find a single piece of information. This whole situation has kicked off a wave of AI tools that promise to pull your company’s knowledge right into your team chats.
When you start looking for an AI assistant for Slack, you’ll find you have two main options: you can either use a native tool that’s already built into the platform, like Slack AI, or you can look at third-party integrations, like the one from Perplexity. Both claim they’ll make your team faster and smarter, but they go about it in completely different ways.
This guide will give you a straight-up look at the Slack AI integration with Perplexity. We’ll get into what it’s supposed to do, how it actually works according to people who’ve used it, and see how it compares to other tools out there. By the end, you should have a much clearer picture of what makes the most sense for your team.
Understanding the Slack AI integration with Perplexity: What is Slack AI and what is Perplexity?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how they work together, it’s helpful to know what each tool does by itself. They’re both powered by AI, but they’re built to solve different problems.
What is Slack AI?
Slack AI isn’t a separate app you have to install. Instead, it’s a set of features built right into Slack’s paid plans. Think of it as an intelligence layer that Slack adds on top of the conversations you’re already having.
Its main tricks are:
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Channel recaps: It can give you a quick summary of what’s been going on in a channel that’s moving too fast to follow.
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Thread summaries: It helps you catch up on those long, winding conversation threads with just one click.
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AI-powered search: It digs through your company’s entire Slack history to help you find answers.
The main thing to know about Slack AI is that its universe begins and ends with Slack. It’s very good at pulling out information that already exists in your channels, DMs, and shared files. From a security perspective, this is a big plus for Slack. They make it clear that your data stays within their system and isn’t used to train some other company’s AI models.
What is Perplexity?
Perplexity calls itself a conversational "answer engine." So, instead of just handing you a list of links like Google, it tries to give you a direct, summarized answer and shows you where it got the information from.
The idea behind its Slack integration is to bring that power right into your workspace. In a perfect world, you could ask Perplexity a question in a Slack channel, and it would pull info from the internet and your team’s past Slack chats to give you a full picture. It sounds great, but as we’re about to see, the idea and the reality are two different things.
The promise vs. reality of the Slack AI integration with Perplexity
The sales pitch for the Perplexity integration is pretty compelling. An AI that can check facts on the web, pull up project details from an old conversation, and summarize feedback, all from one Slack message? Who wouldn’t want that? Let’s take a look at what’s advertised versus what people are actually experiencing.
What the integration is supposed to do
Perplexity pushes a few key features for its Slack integration:
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Get web answers in Slack: Ask a question and get a quick, cited answer without having to open your browser.
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Access Slack insights from Perplexity: When you’re using the main Perplexity web app, you can connect Slack as a source to add internal context to your research.
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Combine team knowledge: The integration is supposed to help you make sense of different internal discussions, from customer feedback to debates about the product roadmap.
The perfect use case is easy to imagine: a marketing team needs to quickly find a competitor’s latest press release, or a developer wants to find a link to a technical doc without leaving the channel where they’re troubleshooting an issue. For simple, one-off questions, it seems like it could be a nice little tool.
Common problems and user frustrations
Unfortunately, the real-world experience doesn’t always live up to the hype, especially when you need it to understand your team’s internal knowledge. A quick look at user forums shows a few recurring and pretty major complaints.
First off, users report that the integration really struggles to access your full conversation history. It often can’t properly read past messages in public channels, let alone private ones or DMs. <quote text="This limitation makes it, as one user put it, "almost useless" for understanding why a decision was made months ago or for finding a piece of information buried deep in your Slack archive." sourceIcon="https://www.iconpacks.net/icons/2/free-reddit-logo-icon-2436-thumb.png" sourceName="Reddit" sourceLink="https://www.reddit.com/r/perplexity_ai/comments/1mxkch9/slack_integration/">
Second, the integration has no conversational memory. If you ask a follow-up question, the AI has no idea what you were just talking about. You have to start over from square one with every single message, which gets old fast.
Finally, the connection often feels like a one-way street. It seems to work a bit better when you’re on the main Perplexity website and asking it to search through Slack from there. This kind of defeats the whole purpose of having a tool inside Slack, which is supposed to keep you in your workflow, not pull you out of it.
These issues pop up when an AI isn’t built from the ground up to bring all your knowledge together. In contrast, tools like eesel AI are designed to train on your entire Slack history and other knowledge sources from day one, so it actually understands the context of your team’s work. Without that deep-seated understanding, any AI is just scratching the surface.
How the Perplexity integration compares with other AI tools
To figure out which tool is right for you, it helps to see how the options stack up against each other. Here’s a simple breakdown of the Perplexity integration, Slack’s own AI, and a more complete alternative built to be a true knowledge hub for your team.
This table compares the three options across the features that really matter for a team trying to work smarter in Slack.
| Feature | Perplexity Integration | Native Slack AI | eesel AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Use Case | Web search & basic Q&A | Summarizing & searching Slack content | Answering questions using all internal knowledge & automating workflows |
| Knowledge Sources | Web + limited/unreliable Slack history | Slack conversations and files only | Slack, Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, Zendesk, past tickets & 100+ others |
| Conversational Context | Poor; forgets previous questions in a thread | N/A (not a conversational bot) | Strong; remembers context within a conversation |
| Setup & Onboarding | Simple install, but doesn’t work well | Built-in, but requires Enterprise plan and paid add-on | Super self-serve; you can be live in minutes |
| Customization | Minimal | None | Full control over the AI’s personality, prompts, and actions |
So, what does this all mean?
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Perplexity is basically a web search tool that’s been awkwardly plugged into Slack. It’s good at pulling information from the internet, but it falls flat when it tries to make sense of your internal team data.
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Slack AI is a solid, but limited, tool. If your team lives and breathes entirely within Slack and your biggest headache is just catching up on conversations, it’s a great fit. But it can’t answer a question if the answer is in your company wiki or helpdesk.
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eesel AI is built to be the central brain for your entire company, and you can access it from wherever you’re working. It really shines by connecting the dots between all your siloed knowledge, your Slack chats, your Confluence wiki, your Google Docs, your helpdesk tickets, and making it all available with a simple question. It doesn’t just find information; it connects it.
This infographic shows how eesel AI connects various knowledge sources, a key advantage over the more limited Slack AI integration with Perplexity.Pricing and setup comparison
A great AI tool is no good if you can’t afford it or if it takes three months to get it running. The best tools have clear, predictable pricing and a setup process that doesn’t require a dedicated IT project.
Perplexity and Slack AI pricing models
This is where things get a little weird with the Perplexity integration. To use it, you need both a paid Slack plan and a Perplexity Enterprise Pro plan. The problem? As of late 2024, if you try to visit Perplexity’s enterprise pricing page, you get a "Page not found" error. That lack of transparency is a pretty big red flag for any business trying to evaluate a new tool. You can’t make a smart decision if you have no idea what it’s going to cost.
Slack AI’s pricing is more direct, but it can get pricey. It’s offered as a paid add-on for all of Slack’s paid plans, which start with the Pro plan at $7.25 per user, per month (if you pay annually). Because it’s priced per person, the cost goes up with every new hire. For a big company, this can turn into a serious monthly bill.
eesel AI: A transparent alternative
This is where a different approach to pricing and setup can make all the difference. eesel AI was built to be transparent and scalable from the start.
Instead of charging per user, eesel AI’s plans are based on usage (a certain number of AI interactions per month). This means your bill doesn’t automatically spike every time you bring on a new team member. The cost is predictable and scales with how much your team is actually using the tool.
On top of that, you can get flexible monthly plans that you can cancel anytime, which is a big change from the annual contracts that are common with other enterprise tools. This fits the whole "go live in minutes, not months" philosophy. You don’t have to schedule a sales call or sit through a mandatory demo just to see if you like it. You can sign up, connect your Slack, Confluence, and other apps with one-click integrations, and have a working AI assistant ready to go in minutes, all by yourself.
This workflow illustrates the simple, self-serve setup process for eesel AI, a contrast to the complexities of the Slack AI integration with Perplexity.The verdict: Is the Slack AI integration with Perplexity right for you?
While the idea of a Slack AI integration with Perplexity sounds good, its current limitations make it a tough sell for any team that needs to reliably tap into its own internal knowledge. Its inability to properly search through past conversations and its lack of conversational memory are dealbreakers if you’re looking for a real internal assistant.
Native Slack AI is a decent tool for summarizing conversations, but it’s a walled garden. It can’t help you if the answer you need is sitting in a Google Doc, a Confluence page, or an old Zendesk ticket. It’s a nice feature, but it’s not a central brain for your company.
A truly helpful AI for Slack needs to do three things well:
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Bring all of your company’s scattered knowledge together into one place.
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Be so easy to set up that you can start getting value from it on the first day.
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Have a fair and clear pricing model that grows with your business.
Stop fighting with limited integrations. You can build a single source of truth for your team by connecting all your apps to a powerful AI assistant right inside Slack. Try eesel AI for free and get started in minutes.
Frequently asked questions
The Slack AI integration with Perplexity is designed to embed Perplexity’s conversational "answer engine" directly into Slack workspaces. It intends for users to ask questions within Slack and receive direct, summarized answers, ideally sourced from both the web and internal Slack discussions.
Common frustrations include the integration’s reported inability to properly access a team’s full conversation history in Slack, making it difficult to find buried information. Additionally, users report a lack of conversational memory, meaning it can’t remember previous questions in a thread.
Native Slack AI features excel at summarizing and searching existing content within Slack, such as channel recaps and thread summaries. In contrast, the Slack AI integration with Perplexity functions more as a web search tool awkwardly placed in Slack, with limited capabilities for reliable internal knowledge retrieval.
Unfortunately, user feedback suggests that the Slack AI integration with Perplexity frequently struggles to effectively access and utilize a team’s complete conversation history within Slack. This limitation hinders its ability to retrieve deep internal knowledge or contextual information from past discussions.
To use the Slack AI integration with Perplexity, both a paid Slack plan and a Perplexity Enterprise Pro plan are required. However, the blog notes a significant lack of transparency regarding Perplexity’s enterprise pricing, as its dedicated pricing page was reported to be unavailable.
No, the Slack AI integration with Perplexity reportedly lacks conversational memory. Each query is treated as a new, isolated question, requiring users to reiterate context or necessary information for follow-up questions within the same thread.
