slack-complete-amazon-empire-acquisition

Perhaps more importantly, the buy would give Amazon control over a platform that many people believe could be the next big thing in computing. Over the years, Amazon's cloud business, Amazon Web Services, has grown to power everything from consumer services like Netflix to corporate and governmental applications for the likes of General Electric and The CIA. Instead, "conversational interfaces" may dominate, powered by voice-controlled systems like the Echo or chat programs like Facebook Messenger and Slack. Perhaps more importantly in the long term, Amazon could give Slack access to its artificial intelligence research and development.