Slack Messaging Service to Add IBM Watson Smarts

Slack Technologies Inc., a business messaging provider, is the latest company to partner with International Business Machines Corp. IBM 0.62 % to add artificial intelligence to its service. Slack plans to improve Slackbot, its customer-service bot, using IBM's Watson, a collection of artificial-intelligence software delivered as cloud-computing services, the two companies said on Wednesday. The messaging company will use Watson Conversation, an IBM service that processes natural language, to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the bot, which helps Slack users troubleshoot problems. These and other enhancements will be available to users early next year, Slack said.