Prevent Brain Drain: Five Tips For Retaining Knowledge in Slack

When employees walk out the door, they take something priceless with them: knowledge. In many traditional workplaces, this institutional knowledge can get trapped in inboxes, private DMs, and across various tools. This leaves new hires and existing teams scrambling to find information that once existed, which slows progress.

Slack is more than where work happens. It’s an AI-powered platform that brings your conversations, apps, people, and agents together in one place, and turns that knowledge into a searchable, shareable resource so teams can keep moving forward, even after someone leaves.

Read on to learn why knowledge often slips through the cracks, and five ways to help you not only retain knowledge in Slack, but also use it to take action faster:

Why does knowledge slip through the cracks?

Most modern ways of working aren’t designed to preserve company knowledge. Even high-performing teams run into familiar challenges, such as:

• Key decisions are lost in private messages and live conversations
• Expertise is siloed across disconnected tools and apps
• Critical context vanishes in DMs and offline conversations
• Too many tools, with too little visibility
• No scalable approach for capturing and reusing knowledge

The cost is significant: large companies lose an average of $47 million per year due to lost knowledge, and even more when key employees leave and there’s no good way to hand off what they know. On average, workers spend 33% of their time searching for information, leading to decision delays and inefficiencies, according to Workforce Lab.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Five ways to retain knowledge in Slack

Slack isn’t just where work happens. It’s also where knowledge gets captured, shared, and, crucially, preserved, so teams can keep making progress even after someone moves on.
It’s easier to prevent knowledge loss before someone leaves. These simple best practices in Slack can make a big difference:

1. Work “out loud” by defaulting to channels, not DMs

Private messages are where information goes to disappear, while channels create a shared record for teams. At Slack, we call this working out loud.
Whether it’s launching a feature, resolving a customer issue, or prepping for a board meeting, working in a channel grants everyone access to the same knowledge. AI-powered search scans messages, files, and conversations to instantly surface relevant information— even from past projects or discussions— while intelligent recommendations suggest next steps, resources, or experts based on context. This way, an employee departs, their knowledge remains.

2. Bring everyone—vendors, customers, partners—you work with into Slack

Your extended team often includes contractors, partners, vendors, and others who contribute to your work. If they’re not in Slack, critical context often ends up buried in email threads or lost in one-off messages.

With Slack Connect, you can invite external collaborators into shared Channels so everyone stays on the same page. There’s no need to switch tools or track down scattered updates; you all work together in one place. Everyone involved has access to the same information, conversations, and decisions. And it also extends the capabilities of AI and Agentforce to your external workforce, helping them quickly access relevant knowledge and contribute seamlessly, even as your internal workforce moves on.

3. Capture knowledge in the flow of work

Workflow Builder is more than a low-code automation tool; it also automatically captures important information as your team works. And now with AI in Slack, you can simply type out what you need and it’ll build a workflow for you, freeing up time so you can get more done.

Think of Workflow Builder as your team’s memory assistant. You can create workflows that automatically ask for project wrap-up notes after a deal closes, collect feedback after a campaign launch, trigger exit checklists, and more.

Best of all, Workflow Builder captures knowledge within your flow of work, rather than requiring separate documentation steps, making it more likely that important information gets preserved.

4. Instantly document knowledge with AI in Slack

We’ve all been there: a great brainstorming session in Slack ends, decisions are made, and then someone asks for an update. Suddenly you’re digging through messages trying to piece together what actually happened.

Coming soon*, AI writing assistance will be built directly into canvas. From any Slack conversation, AI can instantly summarize key points, extract action items, and generate a first draft—no more manual sifting through chat threads. You can adjust the tone from casual to formal, restructure the content, or highlight next steps. If your planning session happens in a huddle, AI will even take notes for you, capturing decisions and creating a full transcript so everyone stays focused and aligned.

The result? Your team’s knowledge doesn’t disappear into chat history or meetings anymore. Every meaningful conversation becomes searchable documentation that keeps everyone on the same page, whether you’re creating project briefs from brainstorming sessions or building documentation from channel discussions.

5. Treat the search bar as your own, company AI engine

In today’s digital workplace, information is everywhere—but finding it can be surprisingly difficult. Enterprise search transforms how organizations manage and retain knowledge by creating a unified search experience across previously disconnected systems.

When employees can quickly locate information across platforms like Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Confluence, they spend less time hunting for answers and more time applying insights. This boosts productivity and fundamentally changes how institutional knowledge persists within organizations.

Even after employees transition between roles or leave the company, their contributions remain discoverable. Enterprise search preserves this collective intelligence by making historical conversations, decisions, and context accessible to current team members. For new employees, this means immediate access to organizational memory without repeatedly asking the same questions.

By connecting external repositories with internal communications, enterprise search creates a comprehensive knowledge ecosystem that respects existing security permissions and compliance requirements. Organizations that implement a “search-first” culture see faster knowledge flow and reduced redundancy in communications.

The true value of enterprise search extends beyond mere convenience—it transforms scattered information into an organized, accessible knowledge base that grows with your organization, ensuring critical insights are never lost and always available when you need it.

Turn day-to-day work into a collective knowledge base

When people leave your team, their knowledge shouldn’t leave with them. By working in Slack channels, you create a lasting, searchable history of your team’s work.

Now, AI in Slack makes that history even more powerful. From lightning-fast answers to effortlessly organized information, we’re building a smarter, more productive environment for your team.

Some AI features are now included in every paid Slack plan, but for teams looking to do even more, each plan unlocks advanced AI capabilities — helping you automate work, make faster decisions, and scale productivity across your organization.

• Pro provides your first experience with Slack’s built-in AI, with basic summarization features for channels, threads, and huddles, making it a breeze to catch up on conversations.
• Using Pro and ready for more? Business+ unlocks a broader set of AI tools, including recaps, translations, workflow generation, and AI-powered search. These features help your team reduce manual work and stay focused.
• Need to scale AI across your company? Enterprise+ delivers Slack’s full AI experience. It includes enterprise search, evolved task management, and enterprise-grade security and governance controls. It’s built for organizations that want to move faster, operate securely at scale, and have AI embedded into every layer of how their teams work now.

Whether you’re just getting started or ready to go deeper, there is a Slack plan designed to fit your team and grow with you.

*Features described as “coming soon” are forward-looking and may be released throughout the year. All dates, features, and functionality for these features are subject to change.