Jackie Rocca says Slack has more than 10,000 AI-powered tools available through applications or third-party developers.
“We actually have more than 10,000 AI powered tools that are available through applications or third party developers.”
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Jackie Rocca
1 episodes · 20 quoted claims
Slack has used AI and machine learning for years in features such as search and channel recommendations.
“we've been using AI and machine learning for many, many years. If you think about our search functionality or when you're recommended different channels to join.”
Jackie Rocca was on parental leave when ChatGPT's rise happened, and she says this gave her space to rethink long-standing user problems.
“I was on parental leave when a lot of the things happened with ChatGPT”
Slack has a meetings product called Huddles, though Slack remains primarily a text-based tool.
“We have a meetings product called Huddles, but it's still primarily text based.”
Slack offers a feature called channel sections for organizing channels.
“We do offer channel sections, which is a great feature if folks haven't checked it out. It's a really nice way to organize your channels.”
Jackie Rocca describes a use case in which an on-call expert paged during a technical incident can request a summary of the conversation before contributing.
“Maybe that subject matter expert just got paged in the middle of the night.”
Slack AI search answers let users ask questions in natural language and get answers drawn from the company's Slack conversations.
“with Slack AI search answers, you can simply ask a question, you know, what is Project Gizmo?”
Jackie Rocca says Slack AI does not create and post messages on behalf of users without their choice to send them.
“we want to make sure that we are not creating and posting things on behalf of our users without them having really the agency to make that choice and send that message.”
One of Slack's product principles for Slack AI is that customers should not need to be prompt engineers or experts.
“Slack AI should not require our customers to be prompt engineers or experts in the field.”
The Slack AI team prototyped for several months before shipping its features.
“So we've been prototyping for the last several months so that we can again not make users think.”
Jackie Rocca says Slack was founded on the idea of being a searchable log of communication and knowledge, unlike email, where knowledge is lost when someone leaves.
“with email, if that person leaves the organization, that knowledge is really lost. With Slack, one of our founding perspectives was really that Slack should be this searchable log of all communication and knowledge.”
Slack's AI team began with employees prototyping on nights and weekends before a formal team structure and hiring were put in place.
“We actually formed this team through a group of people that was prototyping on the side, really just trying to build experiences in our spare time, a lot of nights and weekends.”
Slack is evaluating pre-trained foundational models alongside machine learning models it has long had in the product.
“we are evaluating pre trained foundational models. We have things that are machine learning models that we've had in Slack for a long time.”
Slack is part of Salesforce, which Jackie Rocca says has a strong AI research team.
“We are actually part of Salesforce for folks who might not know, and Salesforce has an amazing AI research team as well.”
Slack built the architecture for Slack AI so customer data stays within Slack's virtual private cloud rather than leaving Slack's infrastructure.
“we have built an architecture where your Slack data does not leave Slack, everything is hosted within our virtual private cloud, our VPC.”
Jackie Rocca has worked at Slack for about five and a half years.
“I've been at Slack for about five and a half years now, and it has been an amazing and fun ride.”
Jackie Rocca previously led Slack's product-led growth team, its self-service group.
“I led our product led growth team for a long time, so our self service group”
Before Slack, Jackie Rocca spent more than six years at Google, working on YouTube and on the launch team for YouTube TV.
“Before Slack, I spent six plus years at Google, specifically on YouTube, and was fortunate to be on the launch team for YouTube TV.”
When Jackie Rocca joined the YouTube TV project, the team was still at the whiteboard stage, deciding on basic design such as the number of tabs.
“When I joined, we were, you know, on the whiteboard, trying to figure out should this thing have three tabs or five tabs”
Jackie Rocca earned an MBA at Stanford and began her career as a management consultant at Bain in Los Angeles.
“Before that, I got my MBA at Stanford, and then also I have my beginnings as a management consultant, so I started my career at Bain in Los Angeles.”