IBM, Slack partner on Watson-powered chatbots

IBM and Slack on Wednesday announced they're partnering to add Watson's cognitive computing capabilities to chatbots and other conversational inferences to the Slack platform. To kick off the new partnership, the two companies are updating Slackbot, Slack's customer service bot, with Watson Conversation. The integration should improve its accuracy and trouble-shooting efficiency. This marks the first time Slack, which just surpassed 4 million daily active users, has used artificial intelligence to power the bot. "As an increasing number of functional teams -- from finance, customer support and HR, to recruiting, marketing and sales -- have integrated their workflows into Slack, the degree of leverage we can gain from enhanced cognitive capabilities becomes massive," Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said in a statement.