Slack promises its new AI features will fix one of its most frustrating problems

• Anyone who's used Slack knows it can be a real pain to try to search for something in the app.
• Slack announced a new generative AI feature Wednesday to help with that.
• Other features can help summarize long conversations or give you a quick rundown on what you missed.

Finding an old message or document on Slack can be tough. Now, the messaging app is hoping its new generative AI features will be able to help with that.

Slack announced the new tools in a blog post on Wednesday. The first is aimed at improving search by providing personalized answers, with citations to relevant messages, based on your company's public communications as well as your personal Slack conversations.

Another helpful trick: If you can't think of the exact key term to use in your search, the AI will "make smart suggestions."

Besides search, the new features can also help summarize long conversations or give you channel recaps to catch up on anything you missed while on vacation, for example.

Slack said its new AI features are available now as a paid add-on for Enterprise plans, with other plans coming soon. The company didn't specify pricing.

Other companies have flaunted AI-powered productivity tools of their own in recent months.

Microsoft has started rolling out Copilot, its generative AI assistant built in partnership with OpenAI, to internal teams in an effort to get more developers to use AI. Google recently rebranded its AI portfolio, changing its chatbot's name from Bard to Gemini. The chatbot counts among its competitors OpenAI's ChatGPT and Grok, from Elon Musk's X.

Now, if only Slack could do something about its redesign.