Slack is committed to data ownership, security and privacy, and our AI features have been built to uphold these commitments. Here’s an overview:

• Customer data never leaves Slack-controlled infrastructure and is never used to train large language models (LLMs).
• AI features in Slack only work with data that members have access to.
• Our AI features uphold all of Slack’s enterprise-grade security and compliance requirements. To learn more, visit our Trust Centre.

FAQ

How do AI features in Slack work?

Slack uses third-party large language models (LLMs), hosted within our secure Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, and data that is already in your Slack workspace or organisation to power a suite of personalised AI productivity tools. When you use AI features in Slack, we apply in-house ranking models (running on our standard architecture) to find and sort the most relevant information. This information is then sent to an LLM hosted by AWS. The LLMs generate a response and Slack returns the response to you. The LLMs do not retain any information from the request.

Is my Slack data used to train third-party generative AI models?

Customer data is never used to train third-party LLMs. Instead, we use a technique called retrieval augmented generation (RAG) that sends only the data necessary for each task to the LLM at the time of inference. With RAG, data is sent in the context of inference requests. While the model may temporarily cache the data, it cannot store the data in a database or on disk.

Will Slack show private data that members don’t have access to?

Slack’s AI features only use Slack data that members have access to at the time of request and won’t display or use data from private channels or direct messages (DMs) that they aren’t members of. For example, AI searches will never surface any results that Slack’s regular search would not. Similarly, summaries will never contain content that you could not otherwise see while reading channels or DMs.

How long will AI features in Slack retain data?

Conversation summaries and search answers

Conversation summaries and search answers produce ephemeral AI responses (i.e. responses will eventually disappear when you navigate away or close the results), and that data is not stored on devices or servers.

Recaps

Recap data is stored for 90 days so that you can temporarily revisit past recap history. If messages used in the recap are deleted or tombstoned (e.g. a record to show data was deleted) by any deletion or compliance policy, the stored recap will also be deleted.

Channel summaries generated by a workflow

Unlike the conversation summaries that users generate for themselves, when you generate a channel summary with the Summarise public channels workflow step, the resulting summary is not an ephemeral AI response. Depending on the workflow’s subsequent steps, the channel summary can be sent as a message to a conversation, or added to and stored in a canvas. In these situations, the message or canvas containing the AI-generated summary will be retained in Slack according to your organisation’s data retention settings. 

How does Slack prevent misleading information (or AI ‘hallucinations’)?

Responses from Slack’s AI features may include citations to the source message that informed the summary or search answer. Select a citation to jump to the original message and review it for more details or verification. Slack employs a quality monitoring system that evaluates AI outputs, alerting the team to regressions in quality once these evaluations detect hallucinations or other evaluation metrics. Additionally, prompts sent to LLMs during AI feature usage follow best practices from our model providers to ensure accurate, consistent and safe results.

Can I turn off AI features or limit access?

Yes. Owners and admins can decide which AI features members of their workspace or Enterprise organisation can use. On Enterprise subscriptions, org owners and admins can also limit access to AI features to certain users and groups. Head to Manage access to AI features in Slack for more details.