Slack serves as OpenAI’s main internal communication platform. The AI startup’s chief operating officer (COO), Brad Lightcap, said that the company’s staff members use the messaging app extensively.
“We are arguably the world’s most active users of Slack internally at OpenAI, and I believe they are going to be extremely lasting and significant platforms for a long,” Lightcap said in a recent episode of Fortune Magazine’s Team Sheet podcast. Additionally, according to Lightcap, OpenAI’s sales force “runs on” Salesforce, which paid $27.7 billion to purchase Slack in 2020.
Both Slack and Salesforce are software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, which is a market that many emerging AI startups, including OpenAI, are breaking into. OpenAI unveiled a suite of office solutions in October, including a contract search tool and an inbound sales assistant. However, OpenAI still uses the well-known SaaS systems internally.
We make use of almost every traditional SaaS solution available. These are quite significant systems for OpenAI, and I believe they will continue to be significant and long-lasting systems for some time to come,” Lightcap said.
How artificial intelligence will enhance Slack and other conventional platforms
When discussing how AI would fit into these conventional tools, Lightcap said on the podcast that it may “dwell in the crevices” of established processes and systems, enabling humans to operate more productively.
However, one of the things we can do is employ AI systems to help bridge the gaps between what the user needs to be able to accomplish with the systems and what those systems look like in terms of a workflow, he added. Therefore, there are many things that come together to influence how you think about preparation for that client and that customer, for instance, if you are a salesman trying to be ready for a meeting.
In the past, you had to go and get all of things on your own. You have to synthesize all of the lessons learned. In order to construct the profile, you had to kind of run the analysis, retrieve the data, and then provide it to the other person who needed the context. We have developed a lot of tools around the ability to compress all of that, which allows us to make our sales teams considerably more effective and efficient. We hold everyone to that standard.
When a salesperson, marketer, software engineer, or anyone else joins the team, they are starting from a higher baseline level of productivity and can begin to think more along the lines of, “Hey, you know, instead of managing five or ten accounts, maybe you can manage twenty accounts, Right?” This is how we kind of look at it. The team’s job is to think about how to actually drive output and impact in our organization. And it gives our company just amazing leverage.