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)
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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."



Meta Becomes the Latest Big Tech Company Turning to Nuclear Power for AI Needs

The Meta logo marks the entrance of their corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California on November 9, 2022. (AFP)
The Meta logo marks the entrance of their corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California on November 9, 2022. (AFP)
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Meta Becomes the Latest Big Tech Company Turning to Nuclear Power for AI Needs

The Meta logo marks the entrance of their corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California on November 9, 2022. (AFP)
The Meta logo marks the entrance of their corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, California on November 9, 2022. (AFP)

Meta has cut a 20-year deal to secure nuclear power to help meet surging demand for artificial intelligence and other computing needs at Facebook’s parent company.

The investment with Meta will also expand the output of a Constellation Energy Illinois nuclear plant.

The agreement announced Tuesday is just the latest in a string of tech-nuclear partnerships as the use of AI expands. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

Constellation's Clinton Clean Energy Center was actually slated to close in 2017 after years of financial losses but was saved by legislation in Illinois establishing a zero-emission credit program to support the plant into 2027. The agreement deal takes effect in June of 2027, when the state's taxpayer funded zero-emission credit program expires.

With the arrival of Meta, Clinton’s clean energy output will expand by 30 megawatts, preserve 1,100 local jobs and bring in $13.5 million in annual tax revenue, according to the companies.

“Securing clean, reliable energy is necessary to continue advancing our AI ambitions,” said Urvi Parekh, Meta’s head of global energy.

Surging investments in small nuclear reactors comes at a time when large tech companies are facing two major demands: a need to increase their energy supply for AI and data centers, among other needs, while also trying to meet their long-term goals to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions. Those emissions are generated, in large part, from the burning of fossil fuels like gasoline, oil and coal. Nuclear energy, while producing waste, does not emit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases.

Constellation, the owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, said in September that it planned to restart the reactor so tech giant Microsoft could secure power to supply its data centers. Three Mile Island, located on the Susquehanna River just outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was the site of the nation’s worst commercial nuclear power accident in 1979.

Also last fall, Amazon said it was investing in small nuclear reactors, two days after a similar announcement by Google. Additionally, Google announced last month that it was investing in three advanced nuclear energy projects with Elementl Power.

US states have been positioning themselves to meet the tech industry’s power needs as policymakers consider expanding subsidies and gutting regulatory obstacles.

Last year, 25 states passed legislation to support advanced nuclear energy, and lawmakers this year have introduced over 200 bills supportive of nuclear energy, according to the trade association Nuclear Energy Institute.

Advanced reactor designs from competing firms are filling up the federal government’s regulatory pipeline as the industry touts them as a reliable, climate-friendly way to meet electricity demands from tech giants desperate to power their fast-growing artificial intelligence platforms.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft also have been investing in solar and wind technologies, which make electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions.

Shares of Constellation Energy Corp., based in Baltimore, were flat Tuesday.