A guide to Slack AI Suggested Prompts: What they are and how they work

We’ve all been there. You know the answer to a question is floating around somewhere in Slack, but it’s buried under a mountain of conversations, memes, and project updates. That feeling of knowing the information exists but not being able to find it is a daily headache, turning what should be a collaboration tool into a black hole where good questions go to die.

To try and sort out this mess, Slack has been adding its own AI features to make conversations a bit more productive. One of these tools, meant to make AI bots less awkward to talk to, is Slack AI Suggested Prompts.

So, let's break down what these prompts are, where they're useful, and, more importantly, where they hit a wall. We'll then look at how you can build a genuinely smart AI assistant in Slack that has access to your company's entire brain, not just its chat history.

What are Slack AI Suggested Prompts?

Slack AI Suggested Prompts are basically clickable shortcuts that pop up after an AI app or bot replies to you. Think of them as the AI offering a few helpful next steps, saving you from having to guess what to ask next.

The main idea is to make chatting with a bot feel less like a dead end. Instead of you staring at a blinking cursor, the bot tries to anticipate your next move and gives you a few logical options to choose from.

Now, here's the thing: this isn't a feature you can just flip on in your settings. It's a tool for developers building custom AI apps on Slack's platform. It takes some coding to get it working, which allows developers to create bots that feel more dynamic. These prompts can change depending on the conversation, which makes them feel more relevant in the moment.

How Slack AI Suggested Prompts work and where to use them

Okay, now that we know what they are, let's get into how they actually function and a few situations where they come in handy.

A quick look under the hood of Slack AI Suggested Prompts

For anyone curious about the tech side, developers use a specific command ("assistant.threads.setSuggestedPrompts") to make these prompts appear. This lets them program up to four suggestions that show up right after their bot sends a message.

The clever part is how they adapt to the context. A well-designed Slack bot can change up the prompts based on who is asking, what channel they're in, or what the thread is about. This is what makes the whole interaction feel a bit more personal and intelligent.

Common ways to use Slack AI Suggested Prompts

When they’re set up properly, these prompts can be a great way to speed up common tasks and help users find what they need. Here are a few examples:

• Getting new hires settled. A new employee pings the internal IT bot for the first time. After a quick "welcome!" message, they could see prompts like, "How do I reset my password?" or "Request software access." It gives them a clear starting point.

• Handling multi-step jobs. Let's say you ask an AI bot to summarize a long document. After it gives you the summary, it could offer prompts like, "Create a task from this," "Share with the #project-x channel," or "Ask a follow-up question." It turns a simple request into a full workflow.

• Finding information. A bot that's plugged into your company’s internal wiki could answer a question and then suggest, "Who's the expert on this topic?" or "Find related documents." This helps you dig deeper without starting a new search from scratch.

The catch with Slack AI Suggested Prompts and Slack's built-in AI

While suggested prompts are a nice touch for custom bots, they're part of Slack's bigger AI world, which has some real challenges and hidden costs. Getting a helpful AI assistant up and running isn't as straightforward as you might think.

Why building with Slack AI Suggested Prompts can be a headache

If you're considering building a custom AI bot for your team, be prepared for a few bumps in the road:

• You'll need a developer on speed dial. This is not a weekend project. Building, maintaining, and improving a custom Slack app that uses these prompts takes real development work, and that work never really stops. For most teams, that's a huge distraction from what they should be focused on.

• It's trapped in a silo. A bot is only as smart as the information it can reach. By default, Slack’s AI learns from your Slack conversations. But what if your most important info is in Confluence, Google Docs, or your help desk? The bot won’t have a clue it exists unless you upgrade to Slack's most expensive plan.

• Admins have their hands tied. Once the bot is live, non-technical managers can't do much to tweak its behavior, add new knowledge, or change how the prompts work. Every little adjustment means filing another ticket with the dev team, which creates a frustrating bottleneck for everyone.

How Slack's pricing limits key AI features

But the biggest roadblock with Slack's native AI is the price tag. To build an AI that can give complete answers based on everything your company knows, you have to connect it to all your apps. Unfortunately, Slack locks this ability away unless you're on their top-tier plan.

Here’s a quick look at how the AI features are split across Slack’s pricing:

As you can see, Enterprise Search, the one feature that lets an AI look through connected apps like Google Drive or Jira, is only available on the custom-priced Enterprise+ plan. This means unless you're ready to pay a premium, your AI will always be working with incomplete information, unable to see the full picture of your company's knowledge.

A better approach: Bring all your knowledge together

Instead of trying to build a custom bot from scratch inside a walled garden, there's a much simpler and more effective way to bring smart AI into your Slack workspace. It all starts with unifying your knowledge.

Break down the walls between Slack and your other tools

Instead of building a bot that's stuck inside Slack, you can use a tool that starts by connecting everything. That's the whole idea behind eesel AI's Internal Chat. It's a powerful AI assistant that plugs right into Slack and immediately solves the problem of scattered information.

An infographic showing how eesel AI breaks down silos by connecting to multiple knowledge sources, a clear alternative to limited Slack AI Suggested Prompts.

What makes eesel AI different is that it connects to all of your company knowledge from the get-go. Whether that knowledge lives in Confluence, Google Docs, Zendesk tickets, or old Slack threads, eesel AI pulls it all together into a single brain. This gives your assistant the context it needs to provide accurate, trustworthy answers, which directly solves the pain of "important questions getting lost." Best of all, you don't need a pricey enterprise plan to do it.

Get full control without writing a single line of code

Unlike the developer-heavy path of building a custom Slack app, eesel AI is designed so that anyone can use it. You can set up a smart assistant for your teams without ever touching any code.

A screenshot showing the eesel AI assistant providing a comprehensive answer directly within Slack, demonstrating a better approach than Slack AI Suggested Prompts.

This means you can get it running in minutes, not months. Just a simple, one-click integration and you have a knowledgeable AI bot ready to go in your Slack workspace. You also get complete control over what the AI knows. You can easily decide which documents or data sources the bot should use in certain channels, making sure its answers are always relevant.

Through a simple dashboard, non-technical managers can even define the AI's personality, set its tone of voice, and create custom rules for when it should hand a question over to a human. It puts the power back into the hands of the people who actually use it every day.

Wrapping up on Slack AI Suggested Prompts

Slack AI Suggested Prompts are a decent tool for developers aiming to make their custom bots a bit more user-friendly. They can help guide conversations and smooth out the user experience. But they're still stuck within a system that's often held back by scattered information and expensive subscription plans.

To build an AI assistant that actually helps your team, it needs access to everything your organization knows, not just what's been said in Slack. A bot that can’t see your wikis, documents, and help desk articles will always be giving you half the story.

By starting with a unified knowledge base, eesel AI offers a solution that's practical, powerful, and easy to set up. It helps you create an assistant in Slack that understands your business and helps your team find what they need, right away.

Ready to turn Slack from a simple chat app into your company's central brain? Start your free eesel AI trial and get a smarter AI assistant working for you in minutes.