ChatGPT Is Coming to Slack. Here’s How to Use It.

Slack is getting an AI boost from OpenAI.

The online workspace is giving AI chatbot ChatGPT its own place within the app. With the new integration that rolled out this week, OpenAI said it will have a sidebar for users to send their work-related queries.

Once it’s all set up, users can ask the AI chatbot for help brainstorming, drafting, and solving problems without having to have a separate app or browser tab open on their device, OpenAI said. In addition to the typical questions you can ask ChatGPT anywhere, the tool can search Slack for messages and files and summarize conversations in other channels, condensing long discussions into concise notes.

Before getting started on ChatGPT for Slack, there are a few prerequisites for setting it up. You’ll need:

• A Slack workspace that allows installation of the ChatGPT app for Slack
• A paid Slack plan
• A ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, or Enterprise/Edu account

If you aren’t the administrator of your Slack workspace, you’ll need permission to download ChatGPT.

Once your request is approved, you’ll be asked to grant ChatGPT permissions. Depending on your workspace settings, this may also require Slack admin approval.

Next, expect to be prompted by ChatGPT to connect the two accounts so that you can use it in Slack.

Then, you’ll be all set. You should be able to find ChatGPT in a list of apps for your Slack workspace and add it to your navigation bar. From there, you can interact with the chatbot, which communicates with the context of your threads and channels in mind.

OpenAI provided these example prompts:

• “Summarize the discussions in the engineering-team Slack channel from this week. Provide a concise overview of the main topics and decisions.”
• “Catch me up on everything unread in my Slack threads.”
• “Give me the recent updates from the incident-service-unavailable Slack channel, including a summary of the root cause behind the incident.”
• “Create a one-page meeting brief with key points discussed in the Marketing channel this week. Include action items.”

ChatGPT could make searching Slack easier. When you’re searching for something in a specific channel, there’s no need to put the # symbol, and it’s OK to get as close as possible to the name, OpenAI said. It doesn’t have to be exact.

ChatGPT isn’t the first AI assistant to come to Slack. Productivity software Asana and Anthropic’s Claude are also available for download on Slack.

OpenAI workers are big on Slack, COO Brad Lightcap recently said.

“We are probably the world’s most active users of Slack internally at OpenAI,” Lightcap said on Fortune’s “Term Sheet” podcast.