Revolutionizing how the world perceives and uses artificial intelligence, OpenAI is receiving the Slack Impact Award for using Slack to accelerate the growth of its operations and stay on the cutting edge of a uniquely competitive industry.
OpenAI is the customer-obsessed research and deployment company behind the wildly popular ChatGPT, a versatile AI chatbot that can compose content and answer questions in a conversational manner. Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT’s powerful generative technology has since dominated the conversation—and OpenAI relies on Slack to find efficiencies and enable collaboration.
Slack, the company’s intelligent productivity platform of choice, empowers OpenAI’s team to prioritize and communicate securely with customers, move projects forward, and further its mission to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. With 700+ employees, the company has over 170 Slack Connect channels and has sent more than 5 million messages since becoming a Slack customer in 2018.
As OpenAI continues on its path of hypergrowth, it’s paramount that it maintains a strong and connected employee culture. “Slack really helps with being able to feel connected to anyone in the organization,” says an OpenAI principal research engineer. The team uses reaction emoji to collect feedback on their models, and turns to Slack huddles to quickly collaborate and further eliminate the need for meetings.
Part of what makes OpenAI’s lean team feel confident using Slack for all internal conversations is Slack’s security features. The team leverages Slack’s Enterprise Grid for the message retention and admin-control capabilities, as well as Slack’s most robust security features such as data encryption, SAML-based single sign-on and granular app management.
Opening up new possibilities in the world of workplace automation, the team uses the Slack platform to find creative ways to automate work. “A lot of capabilities come out-of-the-box, and it was way easier than I expected it to be,” says the research engineer. The OpenAI team sees this as a powerful tool for innovation and productivity.
“Being able to leverage a chat interface where all of your coworkers are already and bring any sort of automation, intelligence or programmatic abilities directly into where they work is really exciting.”
OpenAI is excited for its continued partnership with Slack and the endless possibilities for integration. “We at OpenAI use Slack every day, and it is critical to how we get work done here,” says chief operating officer Brad Lightcap. “Our company is arguably powered by Slack. The idea of marrying this ability and the power that our models have to help us improve the way we collaborate, to help us navigate information better, to understand things better—that is really powerful.”
