Slack Releases Canvas, Updates Platform for Developers, Copilot Comes to Microsoft Viva, More News
Slack made two announcements this week that will add a great deal to its digital workplace appeal. This first is the general release of its platform for developers.
According to a company statement, the beta has taken three years of development and testing across its community and has pulled together four key components to help developers integrate the platform throughout the enterprise to enable collaborative work. They are:
- Modular architecture: The new modular architecture provides 'building blocks' — functions, workflows and triggers — that connect to everything flowing in or out of Slack.
- Developer experience: The new developer experience introduces new tools like Slack CLI and TypeScript SDK to simplify building on top of the platform.
- Data use, deployment: A serverless architecture now supports new deployment, data storage and authentication. It also offers a Deno-based TypeScript — a secure TypeScript runtime built on V8, Google’s runtime engine for JavaScript.
- User experience: The updated user experience introduces an interactive link trigger which allows users to share whatever they built anywhere in Slack.
The other major addition is an update to its Workflow Builder. “Workflow Builder will soon be a supercharged no-code tool that puts the power of automating Slack and integrating everyday tools directly into the hands of users,” the blog reads.
What this means in practical terms is that users will be able to build workflows that can be mixed and matched according to needs as well as making it easier for non-technical users to combine triggers as well as inputs and outputs for the most used software in the workplace.
The company is also changing pricing. Slack says it will be dividing workflows into Premium and Standard.
Running workflows with only pre-built Slack functions will be free, while Workflows with custom-coded functions will be chargeable once you exceed a usage threshold. Pricing is based on the number of times someone in your workspace runs a premium workflow.
Slack Canvas Launches
The other major announcement this week from Slack has a much wider appeal across the workplace. Canvas for Slack is finally starting to roll out to all users as of this week.
First announced last September at Dreamforce, Canvas is a digital surface that allows teams to access, store and collaborate on more data directly inside the platform. Canvas, the company said at the time, will be able to curate, organize and share mission-critical resources.
A blog about the release noted the difficulties the increasing amount of content passing through Slack is creating, making it impossible to keep track of it all. Finding and sharing knowledge and, by extension, collaborating becomes more challenging as a result.
Some of that content, the post reads, is already present in Slack — messages, apps, workflows — but a lot more is found in other apps and platforms throughout the enterprise. Collaborative work and effective communications becomes difficult without some way of pulling all the information about a given subject together. Enter Canvas.
Canvas allows users to gather these different threads together into a centralized, searchable location. A Canvas can contain text and files as well as apps and rich media.
The combined release of Canvas and the developer platform means users will also be able to embed workflows too, so it’s easy to discover and use them in a relevant context, like adding an IT request workflow to an onboarding Canvas.
Canvases can be paired with any channel or conversation for users on the free tier. Paid Slack customers can access Canvases in standalone mode.
Canvas falls somewhere between a document editor and a Notion-like workspace where users can create, build, share and manage projects as individuals or as a team.
“Canvases enhance the real-time collaboration that you have in channels by offering an evergreen place to organize and share information of any kind. It’s a new way of working and will help teams spend less time searching for information, and more time moving work forwards,” the blog reads.
Slack Canvas starts to roll out this week and will be available to all Slack users in the coming months.
Copilot Comes to Microsoft Viva
The other big announcement for the digital workplace this week is Microsoft's announcement that it is pulling its generative AI-driven digital assistant Copilot into its employee experience suite, Viva.
It also announced that its Glint employee feedback platform, which was originally part of LinkedIn, will be generally available as part of the Viva suite in July. Glint will also be getting the Copilot treatment at some point during the year. Glint will also be available as a standalone app.
The announcement doesn't come as a surprise as Microsoft has been clear on its intentions to bring generative AI into as many of its tools and platforms as it can. Viva is just the latest move.
Copilot in Viva is built on the Microsoft 365 Copilot System, which as we've already seen, combines large language models (LLMs) with the data contained in Microsoft Graph and the Viva apps.
Microsoft's first production-ready integration with Viva appeared last month when Copilot was integrated with Viva Sales. It quickly followed that announcement with the introduction of Copilot in Viva Engage.
This announcement brings Copilot into:
- Goals: Copilot develops recommendations for objectives and key results (OKRs) based on documents like the annual business plan or strategies. If accepted, Copilot suggests methods for achieving agreed upon goals as well as notes potential blockers.
- Topics: With Copilot, employees can use a conversational interface to uncover insights into topics and projects related to their work.
- Learning: Copilot delivers individualized learning suggestions based on role or training needs.
- Answers: Copilot acts as a personal reference librarian, helping frame questions and then suggesting resources and experts to use in response.
Glint's AI-based employee feedback and assessment solution fits in nicely here. Glint had already been a bundling option with Viva since Microsoft brought it to Viva from LinkedIn last year.
As part of its introduction to Viva, Microsoft is also integrating Glint into Graph and Insights, which measures employee time use.
"With the integration of behavioral data from Viva Insights into the employee sentiment data from Viva Glint, organizations can get a holistic understanding of the employee experience to correlate how people feel with how they work to drive business improvements," the Viva announcement reads.
Learning Opportunities
Glint will be rolling out to customers in July and to the other parts of Viva later in the year.
Microsoft Decoupling Teams in Europe?
Everything is not rosy for Microsoft, however. The UK’s Financial Times reported this week that Microsoft has agreed to stop bundling Teams with the Office suite to avoid an EU antitrust investigation.
According to the reports, Slack had previously filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft before the European Commission.
The original complaint dates to July 2020 and claims that Microsoft was carrying out “illegal and anti-competitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law.”
"This is much bigger than Slack versus Microsoft — this is a proxy for two very different philosophies for the future of digital ecosystems, gateways versus gatekeepers,” said Slack VP of communications and policy Jonathan Prince in a statement at the time.
The Financial Times, citing what it said were “two sources familiar with Microsoft’s decision,” stated that Microsoft is now planning to Office customers the choice to take Teams or not as the case may be.
Microsoft issued a statement to the Financial Times claiming it’s ready to address European Commission concerns.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced during its April 25 FY2023 Q3 earnings call that Microsoft Teams had crossed the 300 million monthly active users mark.
PwC Invests $1B in Generative AI
There's one final notable bit about generative AI this week, again involving Microsoft. PwC announced that it will be investing $1 billion over the next three years to expand and scale its generative AI capabilities through a continued partnership with Microsoft. The money will go towards building scalable offerings using OpenAI’s GPT-4/ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service.
Part of the plan also involves upskilling its 65,000 employees with AI tools and capabilities. It will also modernize its internal platforms using generative AI to deliver productivity gains across tax, audit and consulting services to clients.
A statement from the company stated that with this investment, PwC will help clients reimagine their businesses through the power of generative AI. The objective is to offer richer insights into businesses and processes and increase productivity though new products and services. It didn’t specify what new products or services are on the way.
PwC stated it has already started implementing capabilities within Azure OpenAI Service for clients in several industries including insurance, aviation and healthcare, among others.
OpenAI Previews Business Plan for ChatGPT
Finally this week, came news from OpenAI about its new enterprise subscription tier for ChatGPT.
According to the company, the Business subscription is “for professionals who need more control over their data as well as enterprises seeking to manage their end users.”
ChatGPT Business will follow itsAPI’s data usage policies, meaning end user data “won’t be used to train our models by default.”
The company introduced the data usage models at the beginning of March, which promise that:
- OpenAI will not use data submitted by customers via its API to train or improve its models.
- Any data sent through the API will be retained for abuse and misuse monitoring purposes for a maximum of 30 days, after which it will be deleted (unless otherwise required by law).
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About the Author
David is a European-based journalist of 35 years who has spent the last 15 following the development of workplace technologies, from the early days of document management, enterprise content management and content services. Now, with the development of new remote and hybrid work models, he covers the evolution of technologies that enable collaboration, communications and work and has recently spent a great deal of time exploring the far reaches of AI, generative AI and General AI.
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