Connect with us

Telecom

Salesforce Launches Trusted Generative AI for Customers in Slack

Published

on

Kindly share this post

Salesforce today announced the rollout of Slack AI, a trusted and intuitive generative AI experience available natively in Slack, where work happens. Customers can easily tap into the collective knowledge shared in Slack through guided experiences for AI-powered search, channel recaps, thread summaries, and soon, a digests feature. These capabilities will enable customers to find answers, distill knowledge, and spark ideas faster.
Why it matters: Nearly half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to efficiently do their jobs, according to Gartner. This, paired with an increasing number of tools and ways to exchange ideas, adds to workers’ cognitive load and makes it difficult to catch up quickly and feel on top of the work day. AI holds enormous potential to make internal knowledge more contextual, relevant, and easier to find and prioritise.
The Slack CEO perspective: “For the past decade, Slack has revolutionised the way we work, bringing people, apps, and systems together in one place,” said Denise Dresser, CEO of Slack. “With Slack AI, we’re excited to take this transformation to the next level. These new AI capabilities empower our customers to access the collective knowledge within Slack so they can work smarter, move faster, and spend their time on things that spark real innovation and growth. In the era of generative AI, Slack is the trusted, conversational platform that connects every part of a business to supercharge team productivity.”
Innovation in action: Starting today, Slack AI’s search and summarisation capabilities can help customers easily find and consume large volumes of information quickly. These features are trustworthy, easy to use, and require no training. Users initiate them through guided, contextual interactions, ensuring they don’t have to learn brand new skills to enjoy the benefits. And each output is secure, cited, and personalised to the user. With Slack AI, customers can access:

  • AI-powered search that delivers personalised, intelligent responses to any question: Users can ask a question conversationally and get a concise answer based on relevant Slack messages. Users can find what they need faster, whether they want to learn about a new marketing campaign, get up to speed on company policies, glean insights about past decisions from historical context, or define unfamiliar acronyms.
  • Channel recaps that generate key highlights from accessible channels: Users can catch up on unread messages, summarise the last seven days, or set a custom date range to summarise. Users can quickly catch up after time away from work, get up to speed on a new project, or jump in quickly to help resolve time-sensitive issues.
  • Thread summaries that catch users up on long conversations: Users can get the gist of a long conversation in one click, and clear sources are included in each summary, allowing users to dive deeper into a highlight. Users can instantly summarise key decisions and next steps from a thread with a lot of back and forth, get up to speed on a customer support ticket, or catch up on a team stand-up to get a bird’s eye view of priorities.
Sales spotlight: Sales teams are under pressure to streamline their operations and maximize team effectiveness. With Slack AI, sales reps can”
  • Easily identify and bring in the right subject matter expert when a customer has a specific question or concern during a deal cycle.
  • Summarise an account channel and get the context they need to prepare for a customer meeting more effectively.
  • Generate key takeaways from a long discussion about deal progress to help keep the team on track.
Engineering spotlight: The incident management process can be time consuming and complex. With Slack AI, engineering teams can:
  • Find answers in past incident channels to uncover potential solutions and apply learnings.
  • Get the right information they need so they can quickly get situated and jump in to help find a resolution.
  • Recap an incident channel and use it as a starting point to draft a root-cause analysis faster.

Slack’s trusted and secure AI experience: Trust is the number one value at Salesforce, and Slack is committed to building AI products safely, responsibly, and ethically.

  • Slack AI runs on Slack’s infrastructure and upholds the same security practices and compliance standards that customers expect.
  • Slack AI’s large language models (LLMs) are hosted directly within Slack, ensuring customer data remains in-house and exclusively for that organisation’s use.
  • Customer data remains siloed and will not be used to serve other clients, directly or indirectly.
  • Slack AI does not use customer data for LLM training purposes.

The future of native generative AI in Slack: More features that help users summarise and prioritise information are on the horizon. Soon, Slack AI will create digests summarising key highlights from channels that users want to stay informed on but may not require immediate attention, enabling them to stay up to speed on what they could otherwise miss while focusing on their top priorities. Additionally, Slack is building a native AI integration with Einstein Copilot, a new conversational AI assistant for Salesforce CRM, that will provide answers to questions directly in Slack that are grounded in trusted customer data.

These new search and summarisation features are just the beginning of how Slack will enable people to work smarter and faster. In the future, Slack will be the command center for work and the conversational interface for generative AI.
Slack’s AI-ready platform: In addition to these native AI capabilities, partners are bringing additional AI functionality into their Slack apps. Available today, upgraded AI-powered apps from Slack’s partner ecosystem allow users to ask PagerDuty Copilot for help resolving incidents, automatically summarise Notion documents in link previews, and more. And coming soon, a brand new AI integration with Perplexity will allow users to subscribe to AI-powered insights and pipe them into Slack.
What they’re saying:

  • “Slack AI is not only a huge productivity boost — it’s easy to use, right where we already work in Slack. Our team loves how quickly they can find answers, which translates to faster decision-making and a greater focus on work that really drives an impact.” – Kate Earle Jensen, Head of Sales and Partnerships, Anthropic
  • “During the pilot program, we experienced firsthand the major productivity gains that Slack AI could drive for our business. Slack AI has helped speed up our employees’ work exponentially.” – Zach Hyman, Co-CEO, SpotOn
  • “At Perplexity, we’re building the next generation answer engine, applying the most advanced LLMs to make knowledge instant and accessible. Now with Perplexity Push, we’re delivering an enterprise integration that brings AI-powered insights directly into Slack. Teams can easily stay in-the-know on topics they care about where conversations and collaboration already happens.” – Aravind Srinivas, CEO, Perplexity
  • “Slack AI helps users unlock the full potential of company knowledge in Slack, all while supporting existing security, privacy, and compliance controls.” — Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Kindly share this post

Ugo Onwuaso is an ICT enthusiast. He believes technology should be used for general good. He holds a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree from the Lagos state University. Dear Reader, Your support matters. But we believe that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. That is why, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and finance and how they affect lives. Our incisive and analytical view of how technology news affects the daily life help individuals and organizations make up their minds. Quality journalism costs money. Today, we're asking that you support us to do more. Kindly support our effort to deliver technology and finance journalism to everyone in the world. Donate as little as N1,000. Bank transfers can be made to: UBA Plc 1017156876 Communication Week Media Ltd

Telecom

MTN Accelerates Network Expansion to  Meet Surging Telecom Demand

Published

on

Kindly share this post

MTN Nigeria is accelerating investments in network expansion and modernization to address rising demand for mobile and data services across the country.

MTN Accelerates Network Expansion to  Meet Surging Telecom Demand

The operator is deploying additional base stations, upgrading existing infrastructure, and expanding fiber connectivity to improve network capacity, coverage, and service quality.

The investments are designed to support increasing smartphone adoption, higher data consumption, and the growing use of digital services by consumers and businesses.

MTN said the expansion aligns with its long-term strategy to enhance customer experience while strengthening Nigeria’s digital infrastructure.

The company expects the ongoing upgrades to improve connectivity, support economic growth, and enable broader access to reliable telecommunications services as demand for high-speed broadband continues to increase.

Advertisement

Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Telecom

Airtel Africa to Connect 5,000 Schools to Free Internet by 2027

Published

on

Kindly share this post

Airtel Africa’s CEO, Sunil Taldar, has announced the telco’s commitment to connecting 5,000 schools across its operating countries in Africa to the internet by 2027 through its philanthropic arm, Airtel Africa Foundation, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

So far, the $57m partnership, which was launched in 2021, has cumulatively connected 3,296 schools and provided access to over 2 million learners and about 40,000 teachers. 64 digital learning platforms have been zero-rated thereby enabling more than 11m users to access educational content at no cost.

Speaking during a visit to St. Monica’s Girls School in Lusaka, which is one of the 300 schools already connected to the internet in Zambia, the Airtel Africa CEO stated that the initiative is having a profound impact on the quality of education by expanding access to digital learning resources for African children, in collaboration with governments.

Mr Taldar added: “Students are accessing best-in-class education from the curriculum developed by UNICEF in partnership with various Ministries of Education and provided through Airtel’s connectivity.

“We are also training teachers, so that they deliver digital education effectively. We aim to continue deepening meaningful connectivity in schools by providing free internet access, zero‑rated platforms and training teachers across the continent”.

Advertisement

Expressing her appreciation, the Headmistress of St. Monica’s Girls’ School, Sr Matilda Soloko said: “Being among the first schools connected in the initial stage, our learners have been able to study using the learning portal and their studies have been intensified. We remain grateful to Airtel and UNICEF.”

UNICEF’s Country Representative for Zambia, Dr Saja Farooq Abdullah said: “What this partnership has brought is really bridging the equality gap and the digital divide. It is making sure that every child learns wherever they are. It was exciting and interesting to see and hear from the girls how they can learn at their own pace, how they can review the materials, and how they do their homework with comfort.

The Director of Secondary Education in Zambia’s Ministry of Education, Yvonne Mwemba Chuulu lauded UNICEF and Airtel for the partnership saying: “At the Ministry of Education, we cannot do it alone, and we are grateful for the partnership that we have today.

“Our children are able to learn in a blended fashion, where we have a teacher who is also employing digital devices. We have also heard from the learners that they are able to access the portal when they are at home, which is a good thing because our learners continue to learn in the comfort of their homes”.

The School Connection programme is expanding digital learning to learners in 13 countries: Chad, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. By equipping these schools with internet connectivity and training teachers on using the digital tools, it is providing children, particularly in underserved and remote regions, with the digital tools and skills they need to thrive.

Advertisement

Airtel Africa Foundation is advancing inclusive development across four strategic pillars, Financial Inclusion, Education, Environmental Sustainability and Digital Inclusion.

Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Telecom

DStv, GOtv Owner MultiChoice Officially Joins Canal+ Group

Published

on

Kindly share this post

MultiChoice has officially become a wholly owned subsidiary of French media company Canal+, marking the completion of one of the largest acquisitions in Africa’s media and entertainment industry.

DStv, GOtv Owner MultiChoice Officially Joins Canal+ Group

The integration brings the South Africa-based pay television operator under the full ownership of Canal+, a global media group with operations in 70 countries.

Announcing the completion of the transaction on Thursday, Chief Executive Officer of Canal+ Africa and MultiChoice, David Mignot, described the development as the beginning of a new phase of growth for the broadcaster.

“MultiChoice is now a full subsidiary of a truly international media group operating in 70 countries.

“The group was founded in France, is listed in London and Johannesburg, and has a strong African presence with operations in more than 45 countries,” Mignot said.

Advertisement

The acquisition combines Canal+’s international operations with MultiChoice’s extensive footprint across sub-Saharan Africa, where it serves millions of households through its DStv and GOtv platforms, as well as the Showmax streaming service.

According to Canal+, the integration will strengthen MultiChoice’s competitive position by giving it access to broader financial resources, technology, content partnerships and operational expertise.

The company said the combined business would increase investment in local content production, sports broadcasting and streaming services as competition intensifies from global platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+.

The transaction is also expected to provide MultiChoice with greater access to international markets at a time when traditional pay television operators are adapting to changing consumer viewing habits and the rapid growth of digital streaming platforms.

Canal+ has expanded steadily across Africa over the past decade and now assumes full control of a business operating in more than 45 African countries, further strengthening its position in the continent’s media and entertainment sector.

Advertisement

The acquisition followed Canal+’s gradual increase in its shareholding in MultiChoice, which began in 2024.

After exceeding the regulatory threshold, the company launched a mandatory offer in April 2024 to acquire the remaining shares of the Johannesburg-listed broadcaster.

Following regulatory approvals and shareholder acceptance, Canal+ secured control of MultiChoice in 2025 before completing the process that has now made the company a wholly owned subsidiary.

Industry observers describe the acquisition as one of the most significant media transactions involving an African company, reflecting a broader trend of consolidation as global entertainment firms seek greater scale to compete in the streaming era.

Advertisement

Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Trending