Solving Real User Problems With Generative AI: Slack’s Jackie Rocca

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
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Visit executive.mit.edu/smrai to sign up for the course and gain the MIT edge today. That's executive.mit.edu/smrai.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:57)
How can generative AI help us collaborate more effectively at work? Find out on today's episode.

**Jackie Rocca** (1:04)
I'm Jackie Rocca from Slack, and you're listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:09)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:27)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, Senior Partner with BCG and one of the leaders of our AI business. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI since 2017, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:54)
Hi, everyone. Today, Shervin and I are talking with Jackie Rocca, Vice President of Product at Slack.
Jackie, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Welcome.

**Jackie Rocca** (2:03)
I'm so excited to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:05)
Let's get started. I think most of our listeners, many of our listeners likely use Slack, but let's fill everyone in.
What is Slack?

**Jackie Rocca** (2:13)
Slack is a collaboration platform. So it started out as a really effective way to message and work with your colleagues.
And it's really expanded over the years to include a lot of your work tools that are accessible from right within Slack. So it's a great way to work with your team, with your colleagues. We actually have external functionality. You can work with customers or contractors. And we are really looking to make it the hub of all of your AI tools and bring in AI into that conversational interface.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:47)
You mentioned AI. Let's go. What's going to be AI related? I heard communication tool.
Where's AI in that?

**Jackie Rocca** (2:54)
I lead our Slack AI product area. We are building native functionality. We are looking at ways that AI can be used to address top user problems that we've been facing for years. Whether you're overloaded with all the communication and tools that you have in Slack, or if you're just trying to find that knowledge across your enterprise, we are using AI to solve some of those top user pain points.
Because we are a collaboration platform, we're also a place that a lot of your AI tools are being built into Slack today. We actually have more than 10,000 AI-powered tools that are available through applications or third-party developers.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:34)
All right.

**Sam Ransbotham** (3:35)
10,000. Let's go through them all, right?

**Jackie Rocca** (3:38)
A lot of them as well are private to specific organizations, but some of them are public available to download today too.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:45)
This is quite interesting. Tell us more about Generative AI. I have to imagine they're either doing a lot or thinking about doing a lot with Generative AI. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

**Jackie Rocca** (3:55)
We are very excited about what's happening in Generative AI. First of all, we've been using AI and machine learning for many, many years. If you think about our search functionality or when you're recommended different channels to join. That foundational element has been there for many, many years, like many products.
But as many of you know, the industry in the space with LLMs and Generative AI has really taken off in the last few years.
I was on parental leave when a lot of the things happened with ChatGBT.
I was so excited about how some of these capabilities could help us take new approaches to some of the user problems that we've been facing for such a long time. We're really taking the approach of starting with those user pain points and constantly trying to think through how does new advancements in technology help us take a fresh approach to solving those issues rather than starting with the technology itself and saying, oh, Generative AI is out there. Let's throw the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. The features that we have launched and available today are around channel recaps, thread summaries, and search answers. And let me talk through a few of those. So on channel recaps and thread summaries, this is really about getting up to speed quickly in channels. So often, there's just so much conversation back and forth. And whether you're away from Slack for an hour or a day or you're coming back from vacation, it can be overwhelming to catch up on that conversation.