A complete guide to Slack AI manage access features

If your team practically lives in Slack, you’ve probably seen the buzz around Slack AI. These new features are designed to make life easier by summarizing channels, digging up answers, and generally cutting through the noise. But with any powerful new tool, especially one that costs extra, the big questions pop up: Who gets to use it? How do we keep it secure? And how do we stop the bill from getting out of hand?

That’s where managing access comes in, and it's a pretty important piece of the puzzle. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about the Slack AI manage access features. We'll cover what Slack AI is, what you get with each plan, how to use the built-in admin controls, and where you'll likely hit a wall.

We’ll also show you a way to get much finer control over your AI, so it works exactly the way your team needs it to.

What is Slack AI?

Before we get into the settings and controls, let’s quickly get on the same page about what Slack AI actually is. It’s not one single tool, but a handful of generative AI features built directly into the platform you already use every day. The big idea is to take all the conversations happening in your workspace and turn them into a source of quick knowledge.

Here’s what Slack AI can do with all that conversational context:

• Summarize conversations: It can give you the highlights of a long channel or a complicated thread, so you don't have to read every single message to catch up.

• Answer questions: You can ask a question in the search bar, and instead of just getting a list of messages, it tries to give you a straight answer pulled from relevant conversations and files.

• Provide daily recaps: You can get a morning digest of the important stuff happening in the channels you care about most.

• Translate messages: It can instantly translate messages into whatever language you prefer.

These features are meant to feel like a natural part of your Slack workflow. But what you get, and how much you can control it, all comes down to your subscription plan.

A breakdown of Slack AI features and pricing

Not everyone gets the same Slack AI toolkit. Access is tied directly to which paid plan your company is on. Figuring this out is the first step, because often the only way to get more features is to upgrade. Let's look at what's included in each tier, based on Slack's official pricing page.

Slack Pro plan

The Pro plan is the entry point for Slack AI. It gives teams a little taste of what the AI can do without the more complex admin or security settings.

• Conversation Summaries: Your team members can get quick summaries of threads and channels.

• Huddle Notes: It provides AI-generated summaries, transcripts, and a list of action items from your huddles.

Slack Business+ plan

The Business+ plan is where the AI toolkit really starts to expand. It adds features that help with search, creating simple automations, and communicating across different languages.

• Everything in Pro, plus:

• AI Search: You can ask questions in plain English and get answers pulled from your workspace's history.

• Daily Recaps: You get those automated daily summaries of key channels.

• File Summaries: It can give you a quick rundown of text-based files like PDFs and documents.

• Message Translations: Translate messages right in the chat with a single click.

• AI in Workflow Builder: You can build automated workflows just by describing what you want them to do.

Slack Enterprise+ plan

The Enterprise+ plan gives you the whole AI suite, plus the most advanced tools for security, compliance, and administration, including better access controls.

• Everything in Business+, plus:

• Enterprise Search: This extends the AI search to include apps you've connected, like Google Drive or Salesforce.

Here's a quick comparison of the AI features you get across Slack's paid plans:

Feature	Pro Plan	Business+ Plan	Enterprise+ Plan
Conversation Summaries	✔️	✔️	✔️
Huddle Notes	✔️	✔️	✔️
AI Search Answers		✔️	✔️
Daily Recaps		✔️	✔️
File Summaries		✔️	✔️
Message Translations		✔️	✔️
AI Workflow Generation		✔️	✔️
Enterprise Search (across apps)			✔️

How to use native Slack AI manage access features

Slack gives admins some built-in settings to control who can use these AI features. They're your first line of defense for managing costs and making sure the tools are used correctly. The options you have will look different depending on your plan.

On Pro and Business+ plans

If your workspace is on the Pro or Business+ plan, the controls are simple, but also pretty limited. Workspace Owners and Admins can basically flip a switch to turn specific AI features on or off for the entire workspace.

According to Slack's help documentation, you usually have two choices for each feature: "Everyone" or "No one." This means you can give conversation summaries to the whole company or take them away completely, but you can't, for example, enable them for just the customer support team.

On the Enterprise Grid plan

The Enterprise Grid plan, as you might expect, gives you more fine-tuned controls, which is a big deal for larger companies. Org Owners and Admins can set access policies for certain people and user groups. Instead of just a single on/off switch for everybody, you can:

• Allow access for everyone.

• Deny access for no one.

• Allow access for only specific people and user groups.

• Allow access for everyone except specific people and groups.

This lets an admin do things like turn on the powerful Enterprise Search feature for only the IT and security teams while keeping it turned off for everyone else.

Limitations of native access features

While these settings are a decent start, you'll probably run into their limitations pretty quickly. The control is all about who can use a feature, not how or when they use it.

• No Contextual Control: You can't tell the AI to only handle specific kinds of questions. For example, there's no way to configure it to answer simple IT questions about printer setup but immediately escalate anything about a server outage to a human.

• Limited Knowledge Scoping: Slack AI mostly learns from your Slack conversations. While the enterprise version can peek into other apps, you can't easily create a curated knowledge base for a specific task (like an "internal IT support only" knowledge set).

• One-Size-Fits-All Persona: The AI's tone and personality are fixed. You can't give your support bot a friendly, helpful persona and your internal HR bot a more formal, by-the-book tone.

Basically, you can manage access, but you can't really manage the AI's behavior. For teams that need automation to be precise, reliable, and customized, this just doesn't cut it.

Gaining granular control beyond native features

When the built-in controls aren't enough, you need a solution that gives you real command over what your AI does and what it knows. This is where a dedicated AI platform like eesel AI comes into play. Instead of just being another feature inside Slack, eesel integrates with Slack and your other tools to give you a level of control the native features can't offer.

Achieve selective automation

The biggest headache with Slack's native AI controls is that they're all-or-nothing. You can't tell the AI to only jump in on certain types of conversations. With eesel AI’s workflow engine, you get selective automation. You can build specific rules that tell the AI exactly which conversations it should handle and which it should ignore.

For instance, you could set up an eesel AI agent in your #support-requests channel to:

• Automatically answer any question about "password resets."

• Immediately escalate any message with the word "urgent" or "outage" to a human.

• Stay quiet and ignore all messages that aren't actually questions.

This workflow shows how eesel AI provides selective automation to handle specific support requests, a level of control beyond native Slack AI manage access features.

This kind of detailed control lets you start automating with confidence. You can begin with small, predictable tasks and expand from there as you see how well it works.

Unify knowledge from all your sources

Slack AI is pretty smart, but its world is mostly limited to what's been said in Slack. Most teams' knowledge isn't in one place. It's scattered across Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, and official help centers. eesel AI pulls all of that together. You can connect over 100 different sources, which means your internal chat assistant in Slack can get answers from your official documentation, not just from some random conversation from six months ago. This ensures the AI gives out accurate, up-to-date information every single time.

This infographic visualizes how eesel AI unifies knowledge from multiple sources, overcoming the limitations of Slack's native data scoping.

Customize AI actions and persona

With eesel AI, you can decide exactly what your AI can do. Using custom actions, your AI agent in Slack can look up live order information from Shopify, create a new ticket in Zendesk, or even update a customer record in Salesforce. You can also use the prompt editor to shape its personality, tone of voice, and rules for when to hand things off to a human. This ensures it always fits your brand and your team's workflow, turning it from a simple Q&A bot into a genuine digital teammate.

A view of eesel AI’s customization rules, showing how users can define guardrails and personas, which is not possible with Slack's built-in access features.

Mastering your Slack AI manage access features

Slack AI has a lot of promise for making your team more productive. The native access controls give you a basic but necessary way to govern who gets to use these new tools. For smaller teams with straightforward needs, these simple on/off switches might be all you need.

But for organizations that need automation to be precise, trustworthy, and deeply customized, the built-in limitations show up fast. You can’t control what the AI says, where it gets its information, or what actions it can take on your behalf.

To really tap into the power of AI in Slack, you need a platform that was built for control from the ground up. By providing selective automation, unified knowledge, and customizable actions, eesel AI delivers the detailed management that modern support and IT teams need to automate confidently.

Ready to see what total control looks like? Explore eesel AI's internal chat for Slack and you can go from setup to a fully functional, customized AI assistant in just a few minutes.