How Slack Wants to Keep You From Getting Overwhelmed by Slack

Slack and similar workplace chat software may have changed how we communicate with our coworkers, but they haven't necessarily cut down on how often we communicate with them. Now, the San Francisco-based Slack believes the next big improvement in office communication will be software that helps workers stay on top of important messages. "It's actually quite time consuming sometimes to keep up with Slack," says Noah Weiss, who heads Slack's Search, Learning, and Intelligence department. Broadly speaking, Weiss and his team are working on making their software better at surfacing important conversations and information, similar to the way Netflix surfaces movie recommendations based on users' viewing habits. On a practical level, Slack hopes to cut down the amount of time it takes to catch up on a day's worth of Slack messages from more than an hour to 10 minutes, Weiss says.