How Slack and AI Can Modernize your Business

By the team at SlackJanuary 31st, 2025

Find out how Careem, the Middle East’s ‘everything app,’ and Saudi fintech Tamara are making life easier for employees with Slack and AI.

For millions of people all over the world, Slack is where work happens. At World Tour Dubai 2024, we found out why. Collaboration comes down to people and data. Slack brings conversations into one place and adds context. And it won’t overwhelm your employees. To help cut through the noise and tap into company knowledge, we’ve embedded Slack AI directly into the platform.

Staff can use the recap feature in any channel to get fast, relevant updates. They can search using plain-language prompts to find the information or experts they need. They can summarize conversations in one click, so they don’t need to take notes during meetings.

That’s in addition to all the automations and integrations that make Slack a great place for your team to work. But you don’t have to take our word for it. We were joined onstage by two companies that live and breathe Slack every day: Careem, the Middle East’s ‘everything app,’ and Saudi fintech Tamara.

Careem’s digital workplace

Careem was founded in 2012 as a ride-hailing app and acquired by Uber in 2019. Today it makes it easy for 50 million customers in the Middle East to get around, order groceries and takeaways, manage their digital payments, and more.

According to Qasim Ahmed, Director of Cybersecurity Operations and IT Infrastructure Engineering at Careem, Slack is the first and last application staff use every day. “We used to take orders by phone, write them on a notepad, and call or text a delivery driver. It wasn’t scalable and we couldn’t provide a 24/7 service,” he recalled.

Slack has become our go-to tool for collaboration and productivity.

Qasim AhmedDirector of Cybersecurity Operations and IT Infrastructure Engineering, Careem

“Slack has become our go-to tool for collaboration and productivity,” he continued. “It streamlines our process from quick idea exchanges to detailed discussions in private channels. We can now seamlessly transition from informal huddles to logging tasks directly into our sprint boards, making the workflow far more efficient.

“This has enabled us to scale, ensuring better coordination and allowing us to provide 24/7 service without the chaos of manual handling. Slack has transformed communication into structured action, improving overall efficiency.”

The average Careem employee is a tech-savvy innovator in their 20s or 30s. They have high expectations for a digital-first experience and an appetite for AI. When Careem implemented Slack, it was looking for automation and simplicity to make managing its complex infrastructure easier and to create repeatable workflows that scale.

“Slack helps us automate everywhere,” said Ahmed, “from IT support logging to enhancing team collaboration and improving productivity across the organization, alerting operational teams, and improving system reliability.”

Now, staff can be productive from anywhere. “The experience is exactly the same whether we’re in the office or at home, so it was easy to get buy-in for the first phase of the rollout,” explained Ahmed. When it was time to adopt AI, Careem needed deeper levels of governance.

Embracing AI the right way

With any AI adoption, trust is key. And trust is our most important value at Slack. Slack AI is safe, secure, and built on trusted infrastructure. We don’t share customer data with LLM providers, and we don’t use it to train our models. In fact, LLMs are hosted within Slack to keep your data in-house.

“When we rolled out Slack AI, our colleagues couldn’t wait to try it. Our challenge was less about user adoption and more about establishing governance and boundaries,” said Ahmed. “When anything is possible, you have to offer guidance on what employees should and should not be doing. We also established what ‘the right way’ to do things looked like for us.”

Careem set up an AI community to shape its exploration of AI. As a result, productivity and efficiency have improved, but Ahmed advises never to lose sight of the balance between innovation and security.

Tamara empowers customers and colleagues

Like Careem, the fintech Tamara is also on a mission to empower people in their daily lives. It serves millions of customers across the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The company partners with leading household brands such as Shein, IKEA, eXtra, and other small and midsize enterprises to make it easier for customers to pay for shopping online and in-store.

For Tamara, the decision to implement Slack was strategic. The company has been growing at a rapid pace, and it needed a solution to increase efficiency. And any product it integrates into its tech stack needs to pass one simple test: Will it save time? With Slack, the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’

Slack replaced email as the primary form of communication, and it’s very much an enabler of productivity. For example, it’s integrated with Tamara’s product management system to speed up updates. Instead of running updates manually, staff can click to update it from Slack, which saves about 30 minutes per person. This is one of many integrations that save two to three hours per person per day, which adds up to a huge productivity gain.

The team also uses huddles to speed up decision-making, which Renjith Radhakrishnan, the Head of IT Business Solutions at Tamara, revealed can save days by bringing together the right stakeholders to make decisions quickly.

Working with Slack Professional Services saved us so much time. It took two months to migrate thousands of channels and accounts.

Renjith RadhakrishnanHead of IT Business Solutions, Tamara

Radhakrishnan explained, “My job is to make sure the tech services we provide to customers and colleagues are top-notch. We’ve been using Slack for the past two and a half years to make sure communication is done properly.”

And thanks to Slack’s human-centric approach, staff love using it. They can get all the information they need by reading threads in Slack channels instead of going through an inbox full of emails. Radhakrishnan even describes Slack as giving his colleagues a ‘communication lifeline,’ especially as the company grows.

Great features and enhanced security

Security was front of mind at Tamara. It started with Slack Business+, which had all the features the company needed but lacked the enhanced security standards of Slack Enterprise Grid. “When we looked into migrating from Business+ to Enterprise, we were worried about whether our small team had enough resources,” Radhakrishnan said. “Working with Slack Professional Services saved us so much time. It took two months to migrate thousands of channels and accounts.”

When the team was ready to go live, switching to the new version of Slack was super-fast. Users came back from the weekend, and it was ready to go. The company achieved all this with zero downtime.

Relevant, personalized insights from AI summaries

With the right security standards in place, Tamara was ready to trial Slack AI. “Our company is no stranger to AI. Almost all teams use it, and it helps the IT team make sure staff get the digital experience they want,” said Radhakrishnan.

The company tested the recap feature, which summarizes relevant insights from each channel, something Radhakrishnan found particularly useful to get up to speed after returning from a vacation. As Tamara expands the use of huddles over its previous video conferencing tool, it could take advantage of summaries to automate notetaking and give staff at-a-glance visibility of the outcome of these meetings.

Taking your Slack implementation to the next level

These companies are great inspiration for how Slack can transform and modernize the workplace. Our team also had some wise words to share with the audience:

  1. When it comes to automation, look for any tasks staff have to do more than three times. A simple workflow will result in big efficiency gains.
  2. AI expands the art of the possible in terms of data. Unstructured data — such as conversations, meetings, and the criteria behind decisions — becomes accessible and actionable with Slack AI.
  3. Integrations are essential to get the full picture of your business. If you want to make your Salesforce data accessible from Slack, check out Slack Sales Elevate.

Read the full case study to find out more about how Tamara relies on Slack to scale, support its collaborative culture, and maintain efficient operations.

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