Slack CEO Is Ready to Ride AI Wave

 Lidiane Jones, CEO of Slack Technologies, speaks during a keynote at the 2023 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, on September 14, 2023. (AFP)
Lidiane Jones, CEO of Slack Technologies, speaks during a keynote at the 2023 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, on September 14, 2023. (AFP)
TT
20

Slack CEO Is Ready to Ride AI Wave

 Lidiane Jones, CEO of Slack Technologies, speaks during a keynote at the 2023 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, on September 14, 2023. (AFP)
Lidiane Jones, CEO of Slack Technologies, speaks during a keynote at the 2023 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, California, on September 14, 2023. (AFP)

Artificial Intelligence is transforming Slack, the widely used workplace messaging platform, its CEO told AFP just nine months after taking on one of the most high profile jobs in Silicon Valley.

Lidiane Jones was handed the reins to Slack after the departure of its co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield who exited two years after his company's acquisition by Salesforce, the San Francisco-based enterprise software giant.

Life at Slack after the blockbuster $27.7 billion transaction was not always smooth sailing and Jones, a former Microsoft executive who shot up the ranks in just a few years at Salesforce, was made chief executive to bring stability.

Jones took the job in January, only a few weeks after the launch of ChatGPT made the world aware of the superpowers of AI, and Slack has moved quickly to not fall behind, especially against its archrival Microsoft.

"It's amazing what has happened to the world," Jones said of this AI moment that has captured the imagination of Silicon Valley and the world.

"We've launched more features in the last nine months than in the several years before."

Brazilian-born and living in the Boston area, Jones was in San Francisco for "Dreamforce", Salesforce's big annual event to plug its new products and AI was on everyone's mind.

Many believe that tools such as Slack are first in line to be profoundly transformed by generative AI, which can produce texts, images and sounds on request in everyday language.

Originally designed to facilitate teamwork and internal communication, Slack, along with its equivalents such as Teams from Microsoft, have rushed out new versions supercharged by AI to act as something close to an online assistant.

"When I got back from my two-week vacation this summer, I had mountains of messages from customers and colleagues to catch up on," Jones said.

"I asked 'Slack AI' to summarize everything and in two hours I was up to date, instead of spending a whole day, or even the week."

She said this recourse to new AI tools works for summarizing all types of content or for fully automating complicated administrative tasks, like approving expenses or connecting users to in-house expertise.

Data is strength

Unlike Microsoft, users can also speak to generative AI chatbots directly within Slack from several providers, such as Claude from start-up Anthropic, and soon ChatGPT, from OpenAI.

This availability of a wide range of third-party apps and tools "is our strength", said Jones.

"We're quite different from Teams...We're first and foremost a very open platform."

The comparison to Teams is a sensitive one. In 2020, when still a startup, Slack filed a complaint at the European Union against Microsoft for bundling Teams in its hugely popular Office Suite.

With some 300 million monthly users, Microsoft's conversation and videoconferencing app surpasses Slack with its 12 million daily active users, according to data from 2019, the last time they were made public.

Microsoft acquiesced to many of Slack's demands in Europe, but the investigation by the EU continues and the Windows giant could yet face more fallout from European regulators.

But thanks to its major investments in OpenAI, Microsoft won a head start in generative AI.

But Jones insisted that Slack is equally suited to excel in AI thanks to the quality of its data, the key ingredient in the technology's magic formula.

"We have all of a company's knowledge on the platform... staff are collaborating across different departments, all of that unstructured data is there," she said.

"That makes our AI capabilities so powerful, because it has so much context," she added.

Won't 'reinvent the wheel'

For the time being, Slack has no plans to develop its own language model, the systems at the heart of generative AI that have made OpenAI a household name.

"We don't feel we need to reinvent the wheel," Jones joked, while reserving the possibility of one day designing a more specialized model.

On an even more distant horizon, Slack may one day develop highly personalized AI agents, sort of digital secretaries that know users down to their most personal detail.

"It is definitely a plausible future. And, look, I have a family, I work, it's very busy... Isn't it amazing to think that a system can track all of it in one place?"

"But it's gonna take time" to make people comfortable to do that, she said.

"I think there's a possibility and desire, but the trust boundary is going take a while for us to get there."



Alphabet Quarterly Earnings Lifted by Cloud and AI

Investors have been watching closely to see whether the billions of dollars Google is pouring into datacenters and artificial intelligence hosted in the cloud are paying off for the Silicon Valley tech giant. Manaure Quintero / AFP
Investors have been watching closely to see whether the billions of dollars Google is pouring into datacenters and artificial intelligence hosted in the cloud are paying off for the Silicon Valley tech giant. Manaure Quintero / AFP
TT
20

Alphabet Quarterly Earnings Lifted by Cloud and AI

Investors have been watching closely to see whether the billions of dollars Google is pouring into datacenters and artificial intelligence hosted in the cloud are paying off for the Silicon Valley tech giant. Manaure Quintero / AFP
Investors have been watching closely to see whether the billions of dollars Google is pouring into datacenters and artificial intelligence hosted in the cloud are paying off for the Silicon Valley tech giant. Manaure Quintero / AFP

Google parent Alphabet on Thursday reported profit of $34.5 billion in the recently ended quarter, powered by its cloud computing and artificial intelligence operations.

Overall revenue at Alphabet grew 12 percent to $90.2 billion compared to the same period a year earlier, while revenue for the cloud unit grew 28 percent to $12.3 billion, according to the tech giant, AFP reported.

Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said the strong quarterly results reflect healthy growth and momentum across the business.

"Underpinning this growth is our unique full stack approach to AI," Pichai said in an earnings release.

He touted the latest Gemini software as Alphabet's most intelligent AI model and an "extraordinary foundation" for the Silicon Valley company's innovation.

Alphabet shares were up more than three percent in after-market trades that followed the release of the earnings figures.

"Cloud grew rapidly with significant demand for our solutions," Pichai said of Alphabet's services and tools hosted at data centers.

Investors have been watching closely to see whether the tech giant may be pouring too much money into artificial intelligence.

"Cloud's growth indicates that Google AI product mix continues to thrive despite heightened competition," said Emarketer principal analyst Yory Wurmser.

Google and rivals are spending billions of dollars on data centers and more for AI, while the rise of lower-cost model DeepSeek from China raises questions about how much needs to be spent.

Antitrust battles

Meanwhile the online ad business that churns out the cash Google invests in its future could be neutered due to a defeat in a US antitrust case.

US government attorneys are urging a federal judge to make Google spin off its Chrome browser, arguing artificial intelligence is poised to ramp up the company's online search dominance.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is arguing its position before District Judge Amit Mehta, who is considering "remedies" after making a landmark decision last year that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in online search.

"Nothing less than the future of the internet is at stake here," Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater said prior to the start of the hearings this week in Washington.

"If Google's conduct is not remedied, it will control much of the internet for the next decade and not just in internet search, but in new technologies like artificial intelligence."

Google countered in the case that the United States has gone way beyond the scope of the suit by recommending a spinoff of its widely used Chrome, and holding open the option to force a sale of its Android mobile operating system.

The legal case focused on Google's agreements with partners such as Apple and Samsung to distribute its search tools, noted Google president of global affairs Kent Walker.

"The DOJ chose to push a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America's global technology leadership," Walker wrote in a blog post.

In another legal battle, a different US judge ruled this month that Google wielded monopoly power in the online ad technology market in a legal blow that could rattle the tech giant's revenue engine.

The federal government and more than a dozen US states filed the antitrust suit against Google, accusing it of acting illegally to dominate major sectors of digital advertising.

District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that Google built an illegal monopoly over ad software and tools used by publishers.

"Google has willfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts to acquire and maintain monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets for open-web display advertising," Brinkema said in her ruling.

Online advertising is the driving engine of Google's fortune and pays for widely used online services like Maps, Gmail, and search offered free.

Combined, the courtroom defeats have the potential to leave Google split up and its influence curbed.

Google said it is appealing both rulings.