Slack AI · Practical walkthrough

Catch up on a Slack channel without losing the disagreement

You come back from a week off to 840 messages in four channels. Slack will summarise them in about a minute, and the summary will be calm, orderly and slightly misleading, because what you need to know is where two people disagreed and nobody resolved it.

Task by Task15 min read + practice

What you'll make

a checked catch-up on one busy channel, with the open questions and disagreements read in their threads.

What you'll need

Slack on a paid plan and membership of the channel. Conversation summaries come with Pro, Business+ and Enterprise+; recaps with Business+ and Enterprise+. On a legacy Business+ or Enterprise Grid plan without the Slack AI add-on, you get the Pro features only. Summaries only include what you can already see: public channels, plus private channels and DMs you’re in. Allow about twenty minutes.

Example result.

Period and channel: #ops-pricing, 5–13 October
Confirmed: Rhys shared the updated margin sheet [link]
Open decisions: courier surcharge, flat (Priya) or banded (Rhys). Priya asked for a decision by Friday 9 October; none found [link]
Questions to ask: Tom posted the 18 November review date. Who signs that off?
Coverage gaps: DMs and private channels I'm not in

Two features get called “catching up”. A conversation summary is one you generate on demand for a channel, DM or thread. A recap is the automated daily digest of channels in your sidebar. This guide is mostly about the first, because it lets you choose the date range, and after a week away the date range is the whole game.

1. Summarise the channel for the period you were away

On desktop:

Open the channel or DM.
Click the three dots icon at the top of the conversation and select Summarize channel or Summarize conversation.
Choose unread messages, the last seven days or a custom date range. The custom range is desktop only.
Click the More details icon to see the summary’s sources.

On mobile, open the channel and tap Summarize in the top right, choose an option, then tap the badge on the Summarize icon when it’s ready. In the Catch Up view, you can also pinch a channel or thread to generate a summary. Larger ranges take longer, and Slack notifies you when the summary is ready.

Pick the custom date range over “unread” when you can.

Why this works: unread is a fact about your reading habits, not about the project. If you half-skimmed Tuesday on your phone, Tuesday is excluded, and Tuesday may have been the day it all happened.

What you should see: a short summary of the whole period, with a More details icon.

2. Read it as a table of contents, not as the news

A summary tells you what a conversation was about. It isn’t built to tell you that it ended badly, that two people are still at odds, or that one person announced a decision and nobody else acknowledged it.

Disagreement compresses into neutral phrases. Twelve messages of genuine conflict about a supplier become “the team discussed the supplier options”, which is true, complete-sounding and useless.

So use the summary for what it’s good at — telling you which four of the forty topics are yours — and then go and read those four.

Why this works: you stop asking the summary to judge the week and use it to choose where to read.

What you should see: a shortlist of the lines that touch your work, especially any with a date, a decision or a soft verb such as “discussed” or “considered”.

3. Open the sources and go to the argument

Click More details. The sources link to the messages themselves, so the summary becomes an index to a week you’d otherwise scroll.

For each line on your shortlist, open its sources and read the surrounding thread, looking for:

Replies that start with “I’m not sure” or “hang on”. Summaries round these off. The original message doesn’t.
A question that got no answer. Check whether it was settled later in the thread or elsewhere. The summary’s silence can’t settle it.
A reaction doing the work of a sentence. A thumbs-up may mean agreement, acknowledgement or sign-off. Check who reacted and whether they could decide.
A decision stated by one person. “Right, we’ll go with option B then” is summary-friendly. Check whether that person could decide and whether anyone else agreed.

For a long or important thread, summarise it on its own: open the thread, click Summarize at the top, then More details. Still read the decisive messages yourself.

Why this works: these four patterns are where meaning lives in a thread and where summaries smooth it over.

What you should see: for each line on your shortlist, either the message that settles it or a clear sign that nothing did.

4. Write a short checked catch-up

Write a few lines for yourself, linking the messages you relied on:

Period and channel:
Confirmed, with source links:
Open decisions, owner and requested date if stated:
Questions to ask:
Coverage gaps or later messages still to check:

Why this works: each line has to point at a message, so a phrase from the summary can’t slip in as fact.

What you should see: five lines like the example result, with every decision linked or listed as open.

Check the result

Every “confirmed” line links to a message that says so, from someone who could decide.
Every open decision has the date that was asked for, if one was.
Anything you couldn’t find stays a question, not an assumption.
Coverage gaps name what you didn’t check.

Keep the feature’s limits in mind. It has no “unresolved” flag. It doesn’t read reactions as positions, so a channel that does half its business in emoji summarises thinly. It can’t see what you can’t see: if the real argument moved to a private channel or a DM you’re not in, which is where contentious conversations usually go, the summary will be a faithful account of the polite remainder. And every summary reads with the same even confidence whether the week was routine or on fire.

The usual failure: a live disagreement reported as a neutral fact: “considered”, “discussed”, “confirmed”. You spot it when the sources show a thread that stops without a conclusion, or a decision from one person with only reactions after it. When you can’t find a conclusion, don’t fill the gap from the summary. Ask in the thread:

Catching up on [topic]. The last message I can find is [date and message]. Was this decided after that? If not, who is deciding and by when?

[topic] is the subject of the thread, and [date and message] is the last message you found.

Worked example: the summary that was true and misleading

Fictional example. A channel called #ops-pricing, 340 messages over eight days. The channel summary says:

The team discussed the Q1 trade price list. Options for the
courier surcharge were considered, and the November review date
was confirmed. Rhys shared the updated margin sheet.

Four plausible clauses. Now open the sources.

“Confirmed” is one person’s word. It cites one message from Tom: “Confirming we’re moving the review to 18 November.” Three people reacted with a thumbs-up and nobody replied. It’s probably fine, but it isn’t a group decision until you know Tom could make it. That goes in “Questions to ask”.
“Considered” hides the failure. The thread has nineteen messages. Priya proposed a flat surcharge, Rhys argued for a banded one, two more people joined, and the last message is Priya: “ok but then we need to decide by Friday or we’re quoting the old rate.” It’s now the following Wednesday. Before calling it overdue, check for a later decision in the channel; there isn’t one, so it goes in “Open decisions” and you post the repair question in the thread. The summary told you the surcharge was “considered”. The sources told you it’s unresolved, overdue and about to cause a pricing error. The summary wasn’t wrong — it was the wrong level of detail for the only question that mattered.
“Shared” is what summaries are good at. Rhys’s margin sheet exists and you can go and find it.

Task kit for this job: Download (ZIP) · Reusable instructions

Go deeper

Optional training: Set up Recap for the channels you watch but don't work in

Recaps are a daily summary of the channels you choose, for channels you want to keep tabs on without being interrupted. They come with Business+ and Enterprise+.

Click Recap in the sidebar (on mobile, tap Recap from the Home tab). Click More details to see a recap’s sources. To choose channels, click Manage Recap in the top right, search for channels to add, untick channels to remove, use the toggle to mute or unmute, and click Save. A new recap arrives every morning covering the previous day.

Muting a recap channel keeps your sidebar tidy and lets the digest do the work. Be deliberate about it: a recap is a summary, with all the flattening above, so leave unmuted the channels where you need to catch disagreement early.

Optional training: What your admins control

If a feature is missing, check plan, role and admin settings before assuming a fault. Slack says the AI features available to you depend on your subscription, your role (member or guest) and whether admins have restricted access.

On Pro, Business+ and Enterprise Select, owners and admins go to Admin in the sidebar › Workspace settings › Roles & permissions › Feature access › AI, then Edit next to a feature and choose Everyone or No one. On Enterprise Grid and Enterprise+, the route starts from the organisation name in the sidebar › Tools & settings › Organization settings › Roles & permissions › Feature access › AI, with extra options such as Only specific people and groups.

Primary owners can also choose whether new AI features switch on automatically: Future AI feature releases › Edit › Always allow access to new AI features.

Optional training: Make the channel easier to summarise next time

A summary can only be as clear as the conversation. Two habits help, and neither needs a tool.

Put decisions in a message that says it’s a decision and names who agreed: “Decided: banded courier surcharge, agreed by Priya and Rhys, 14 October.” “ok yeah let’s do that” doesn’t survive compression.

Close threads out loud. A thread that ends with the last person going to lunch looks the same as a resolved one. One final message — “going with the banded option” or “still open, picking this up Monday” — is the most useful thing anyone in the channel can do for everyone who reads it later. Record the final decision in its proper place too, rather than moving confidential discussion into a wider channel to make it easier to summarise.