When was the last time you sent a private Slack message?
You know, for like a quick question, to share some information, or just quietly vent about a frustrating meeting or *that* annoying coworker?
Well, that may be changing.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal report, some companies are encouraging employees to use public Slack channels instead of private messages.
And the reason? It has less to do with workplace transparency than you might think.
It's because your workplace conversations contain gold.
Product updates.
Strategy discussions.
Important decisions.
The little details that matter.
As Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, told the Wall Street Journal:
"A big part of getting these agents to work really, really well is to make sure they have as much context as you can feed it."
Zapier's been pushing public channels for years to help new hires learn from past discussions. But AI has made that playbook even more valuable. They now record virtual meetings and upload key discussion notes directly to Slack, giving AI more context to summarize for employees who don't have time to read everything.
The catch? Privacy.
UC Berkeley professor Mathijs De Vaan warns that employees' messages could be used to train AI models. And knowing your words might be accessible to AI could make people less willing to brainstorm openly.
But it's not stopping the shift.
Slack is leaning into it, too.
Salesforce, which owns Slack, is actively steering the platform in this direction. Joe Inzerillo, the company's president of enterprise AI technology, says keeping information in one place gives AI more context to drive innovation.
They even introduced group chats where employees and AI agents can collaborate on coding.
Inzerillo told the Wall Street Journal:
"Having more things in a system of record, having more things accessible, is the fuel that powers the innovation."
And it’s not just big companies making the shift.
Newer companies are following suit. ElevenLabs, which develops AI-voice agents, has taken a similar approach. They built an AI agent that turns Slack updates into a daily podcast for its 800+ employees.
ElevenLabs Head of Operations, Victoria Weller, said:
"You don't need to find a person that was in the room for that conversation to get a readout of it."
The shift is clear: more transparency means smarter AI, which means better work for everyone.
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