AI Virtual Assistants: Transform Your Team’s Collaboration

When tedious work consumes your team’s time and energy, there’s less room for the creative and strategic thinking that drives a business forward. In fact, a global survey from the Workforce Lab at Slack found that employees report spending 33% of their day on tasks they consider low value.

However, recent advancements have enabled AI virtual assistants to handle routine tasks, transforming how your team gets things done. Learn how to use AI virtual assistants to improve collaboration, workflow, and productivity across your organization.

What is an AI virtual assistant?

An AI virtual assistant is a software tool powered by artificial intelligence that answers questions, generates content, manages workflows, and provides personalized insights to support decision-making. You can think of them as built-in teammates that use natural language processing (NLP) to understand and respond to what you ask. They also learn from large amounts of data to spot patterns, and, as they get more experience, they become even better at understanding context, following commands, and getting tasks done.

Business benefits of AI virtual assistants

Investing in AI virtual assistants can help teams work faster and smarter. They take care of the technical tasks like processing and analyzing vast amounts of data, uncovering insights, and generating content in seconds. For example, Slack users can pair its own AI features with third-party integrations to experience the benefits of AI assistive tools without ever leaving the platform.

Here are some additional benefits of using AI virtual assistants:

• Organize and prioritize tasks: AI virtual assistants simplify task management by automatically assigning, tracking, and prioritizing responsibilities within the work operating systems you use daily, such as Slack.
• Turn insights into action: For sales and service teams, tools like Agentforce can connect directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform to uncover key customer data, analyze trends, and suggest next steps. Summarizing opportunities and providing context-based recommendations lets your team make informed decisions in real time.
• Improve onboarding: Virtual assistants can improve onboarding by personalizing the training experience to meet individual needs, providing instant access to information, and offering real-time feedback. This makes the process more efficient, engaging, and tailored to each new employee’s role and learning style.
• Accelerate team communication: AI-generated updates and insights keep your team informed and reduce decision-making bottlenecks. Virtual assistants can summarize long threads or highlight critical points across your communication tools.
• Automate repetitive tasks: AI assistants can automate tedious administrative duties like scheduling meetings, drafting documents, and managing to-do lists. This allows your team to focus on high-value work without getting bogged down by routine tasks.
• Drive faster sales cycles: AI virtual assistants can help sales teams qualify leads, analyze competitor data, and develop pricing strategies to close deals more efficiently. For example, integrating Salesforce and Slack lets you use AI agents to act on sales data — such as notifying reps of new sales opportunities, identifying key stakeholders, and facilitating collaboration — directly within the workspace.
• Keep projects on track: Tools like Slack AI Workflow Builder can improve team collaboration by automating tasks like organizing huddle notes, summarizing key updates, and highlighting next steps. Natural language prompts, such as “Send a welcome message to people that join a channel,” can be used to create customized workflows, including generating automatic channel summaries.
• Improve creative workflows: Teams can produce high-quality creative assets directly in their workspace using tools like Adobe Express in Slack. This integration lets users quickly create on-brand visuals and templates without opening an extra tool.
• Boost team performance: Tools like Agentforce provide personalized feedback based on Slack conversations, offering actionable insights to build skills, strengthen client relationships, and drive results. Sellers can practice pitching, addressing objections, and negotiating through realistic role-plays customized to each deal. AI agents can deliver consistent feedback on strengths, areas for improvement, and actionable steps to advance deals, all grounded in CRM data.

 

Challenges of AI virtual assistants

Working alongside AI virtual assistants can be a great way to improve operations across your organization, collaborate more effectively, and make data-driven decisions faster. However, it does have its challenges.

Here are some of the drawbacks you may encounter and potential solutions to help you navigate them:

Privacy and security concerns

• The challenge: AI virtual assistants often rely on access to large amounts of sensitive data, including unstructured conversational data. This can raise concerns about data security, unauthorized access, and compliance with privacy regulations.
• The solution: AI tools that prioritize data security, like Slack AI, avoid using customer data to train large language models (LLMs). To safeguard sensitive information, implement strict data access controls and encryption, and adhere to industry regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).

Learning curve for teams

• The challenge: Introducing AI virtual assistants requires employees to learn new workflows and adjust to interacting with AI systems, which can initially slow productivity.
• The solution: Provide clear, step-by-step training and offer ongoing support as teams adapt to the technology. Start with simple use cases, such as automating reminders or summarizing meetings, to help employees build confidence and see immediate benefits.

Dependence on quality data

• The challenge: AI virtual assistants need accurate, well-structured data to deliver meaningful insights and practical recommendations. Poor-quality or incomplete data can limit their usefulness.
• The solution: Review and clean your data sources regularly to maintain accuracy. AI automation tools like Workflow Builder can help teams create automated workflows that collect and organize data efficiently, reducing the risk of errors.

Resistance to adoption

• The challenge: Employees may hesitate to trust or rely on AI tools, fearing they might replace human roles or disrupt established workflows.
• The solution: Remember that AI virtual assistants are designed to enhance human capabilities — not replace them. Show your team how these tools take on repetitive tasks and allow them to focus on more creative and strategic work. Share success stories and data demonstrating how these tools have positively impacted other teams to help prove their value.

Ongoing maintenance and updates

• The challenge: AI systems require regular updates and fine-tuning to stay aligned with your organization’s evolving needs and workflows.
• The solution: Assign a dedicated team or individual to oversee AI system maintenance, including updates and customization. Work with trusted vendors to ensure you use the latest features and integrations that meet your needs.

Over-reliance on AI

• The challenge: Teams may become overly reliant on AI assistants for decision-making or content generation, potentially overlooking critical human judgment and creative problem-solving.
• The solution: Encourage a balanced approach where AI handles routine tasks and provides insights while humans review and finalize critical decisions and content publishing. Emphasize collaboration between AI and team members.

 

Key factors when choosing your AI virtual assistant

Selecting the right AI virtual assistant tool can greatly impact your team’s efficiency and success. To make the best choice, consider these key factors:

• Business needs: Identify the specific problems you want your assistant to solve, like automating tasks or improving customer interactions.
• Integrations: AI tools should connect with your existing project management software, CRM, and other platforms you use daily. Be sure to choose an assistant that integrates with your communication tools — including video conferencing, instant messaging, and digital workspaces — to support collaboration and decision-making.
• Contextual understanding: Choose an assistant that uses conversational data to provide accurate and relevant responses based on the flow of discussions.
• Security and compliance: Prioritize tools with strong data protection and compliance with industry regulations.
• User-friendliness: Select an intuitive AI assistant that’s easy for your team to learn to use. For example, assistants with clear directories or dashboards outlining their capabilities make it easy for teams to understand their functions and use them effectively.
• Cost-effectiveness: Assess the assistant’s value in relation to its cost, ensuring it aligns with your budget and long-term goals.
• Task orchestration: Look for tools that can handle multi-step processes, like gathering data, notifying stakeholders, and organizing follow-ups, all within the same platform.
• Performance tracking: Choose a tool that offers analytics and reporting features to track its impact and identify areas for improvement.

 

Future developments for AI virtual assistants

The global intelligent virtual assistant market is experiencing significant growth. According to research from Market.us, the total market value was expected to reach $20.7 billion by the end of 2024 and $125.7 billion by 2030. With a projected growth rate exceeding $100 billion in just six years, we can expect future AI innovations to help businesses and teams work faster and smarter.

Here are some of Salesforce’s top predictions and trends to keep in mind as you adopt and invest in AI virtual assistant tools.

AI confidence will grow

Despite wider-spread AI tool adoption in 2024, many companies have yet to take the leap due to things like lack of knowledge, skills, trust, and budget. That being said, we’re likely to see this barrier-to-reliance on AI wane as users gain more experience with agents, using them for common tasks like automating projects, new hire onboarding, content creation, or managing service operations. Agents’ advanced reasoning and ability to make decisions and act autonomously is likely to transform how users work and engage with customers. This shift may lead to greater confidence with AI, including higher adoption and ROI for businesses.

Virtual assistants will be commoditized

The “personal assistant” aspect of AI for general productivity — drafting emails, scheduling appointments, summarizing documents, etc. — is poised to become as common as spell-check. We may soon see this technology integrated across business AI tools and platforms, and even built into our personal devices. AI that goes beyond generic assistance and into highly contextual support — for example, understanding the unique challenges and needs of your industry to carry out meaningful, strategic business tasks and decisions on your behalf — will be a transformative development for common AI tools.

AI agents will collaborate and work together

Soon, we’re likely to see AI agents working together and collaborating on everyday tasks and business challenges. This will transform not just the way we think about productivity and problem-solving, but how it gets done. AI agents are likely to become integrated into our lives, on a personal and business level. Platforms such as Agentforce will offer agents tailored to specific tasks that work together to achieve shared goals. Rather than just using AI, we’ll likely head toward creating and customizing AI agents that collaborate to understand and execute strategic tasks and decisions, in both personal and professional contexts.

Boost team productivity and collaboration with Slack AI

Imagine what your team could accomplish by reclaiming 33% of their time each day. Thankfully, winning back time becomes a reality when you integrate AI virtual assistants into your business processes. But saving time is just the beginning. You can also quickly analyze data, make smarter decisions, and enhance team collaboration for increased operational efficiency and better business outcomes.

Discover how Slack AI can transform the way your team works.