Imagine your company just enabled Slack’s shiny new AI features – from channel summaries to AI-driven searches – promising to supercharge productivity. Everyone’s talking about how generative AI could save time and streamline work. In fact, enterprise spending on AI jumped from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $13.8 billion in 2024 (a sixfold increase) as pilots became full deployments.
With AI adoption exploding, many leaders find themselves wondering:
“Are our employees actually using these AI tools?“
It’s a fair question. Slack’s AI can only deliver benefits if people use it. As one Slack survey revealed, workplace AI usage increased by 24% in just one quarter, with 1 in 4 desk workers trying AI tools by early 2024 (up from 1 in 5 by the end of 2023). Around 80% of those using AI say it’s already improving their productivity.
Those are exciting stats, but they beg another question: how do you know if your teams are part of that 25% and reaping those benefits? In this post, we’ll explore why tracking Slack AI usage matters and how you can actually do it.
Monitoring how employees use (or don’t use) Slack’s AI features can deliver several key insights and benefits:
If your company is paying for Slack’s advanced AI, you’ll want to quantify the return on that investment.
Are employees leveraging the AI capabilities that justify the cost? Tracking usage helps put hard numbers behind the anecdotes. For instance, if Slack’s AI is truly saving users ~1.5 hours a week as advertised, usage metrics can validate whether those time savings are being realized across your teams.
Ultimately, the goal of Slack’s AI is to boost productivity – and there’s early evidence it works. By tracking usage, you can correlate AI adoption with productivity metrics.
Do teams that utilize Slack AI resolve tickets more quickly or complete projects sooner? If some departments are barely touching the AI features, they might be missing out on efficiency gains that others are enjoying. Knowing this allows you to spread best practices.
In many organizations, AI adoption is happening fast but unevenly. Early adopters tend to cluster in certain roles – often the more tech-centric teams. Within Slack, you might discover similar patterns. It’s not uncommon to find that your product and support teams eagerly embrace Slack AI, while groups like legal or operations use it sparingly. Tracking usage shines a light on these disparities. This isn’t about calling anyone out – it’s about understanding where AI proficiency gaps exist.
Having concrete data on Slack AI usage allows HR, IT, and business leaders to make informed decisions. Executives love to see data. If you’re championing further AI integration, being able to say “50% of our employees used Slack’s AI at least once last month, up from 30% a quarter ago” makes a strong case that the workforce is ready and deriving value. On the other hand, if adoption is stagnant, leadership might rethink the rollout strategy or invest in more user support. It’s hard to manage what you don’t measure, so tracking Slack AI use turns a fuzzy topic into a quantifiable KPI.
On the surface, Slack doesn’t blatantly broadcast “25 people summarized threads today!” in your workspace. So how do you peek under the hood to see usage patterns? Thankfully, there are a few ways, ranging from basic to advanced:
Slack’s paid admin Analytics Dashboard now includes an AI Analytics tab that tracks how employees use Slack’s native AI. It displays metrics such as AI-assisted message composition, summarized clicks, AI-powered search adoption, and channel-level engagement. These metrics provide a quick view of overall adoption and which features are most popular. They also reveal gaps, such as heavy use of summaries but little Canvas writing, so you can target training or communications.
This is a more manual approach, but sometimes simply asking your employees can yield insights. Quantitative metrics tell what is happening; qualitative feedback tells why. For example, you might discover people didn’t know a feature existed or felt unsure how to use it. This may take time to complete a good number of surveys and feedback, and could be highly manipulated by the responses of the employees.
While Slack’s own analytics give you a snapshot of AI usage, you may want to dig deeper and have more flexible, detailed reporting – especially in a larger organization. This is where a platform like Worklytics can elevate your Slack AI tracking to the next level. Worklytics is a people analytics tool designed to integrate with workplace apps (like Slack, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, etc.) and provide rich insights into how work gets done. When it comes to Slack and its AI features, Worklytics offers some compelling advantages:
Modern companies utilize a stack of tools – Slack might be one of several places where AI is emerging (others include Microsoft Teams with Copilot, Google’s AI in Workspace, and project management bots, among others).
Worklytics is designed to aggregate data from multiple platforms into a single dashboard. Even if we focus just on Slack now, this unified approach means you can eventually correlate Slack AI usage with other signals (for example, linking Slack activity with meeting load from your calendar, or comparing Slack AI adoption to email usage trends).
Worklytics integrates with your HR or directory info, so it understands your org’s structure (departments, teams, office locations, job roles, etc.). This means you can slice Slack AI usage data to see patterns across different groups.
For example, you could instantly view AI adoption by department: maybe 75% of Engineering used Slack’s AI this month, but only 20% of Marketing did.
You could compare by role (are managers using AI more or less than individual contributors?). These insights are gold for targeted action.
A critical concern when discussing employee tracking is privacy. No one wants “Big Brother” watching over shoulder, and any solution must tread carefully here. Worklytics is designed with privacy in mind – it anonymizes and aggregates data to focus on team patterns, not individual spying. In practice, this means Worklytics doesn’t expose specific content of Slack messages or pinpoint that “Alice used the AI summary at 3:45pm today.” Instead, it might report “X% of the Sales team used Slack AI this week” or “Team Alpha generated 25 AI summaries this month vs Team Beta’s 5.” This is enough detail to be actionable without prying into personal info. Moreover, Worklytics adheres to data protection compliance (GDPR, etc.)
Worklytics doesn’t lock you into a single interface. It can feed data into tools like Power BI or Tableau if you have existing analytics setups. This means you can easily combine Slack AI usage data with other organizational data. You could even create a composite “AI Adoption Score” that blends Slack usage, other tool usage, and outcome metrics, giving executives a one-stop view of your company’s progress in the AI journey. The key point: Worklytics provides not just the raw tracking but the ability to visualize and report the data in ways that make sense to your stakeholders.
We began by imagining the moment when Slack’s AI features arrive in your organization – the curiosity, the uncertainty, the potential. By now, it should be clear that tracking Slack AI usage is the linchpin that connects that potential to real outcomes. It’s the feedback mechanism that tells you if and how the technology is being adopted, so you can convert AI promises into tangible productivity gains. Without tracking, you’re essentially hoping for the best; with tracking, you can actively manage and maximize Slack’s impact.
In a world where AI is fast becoming a competitive differentiator, having visibility into your organization’s AI adoption is no longer optional – it’s a necessity. So start leveraging advanced platforms like Worklytics for a comprehensive, ongoing view of AI usage across your teams. With the right data in hand, you can foster a culture that not only welcomes innovation but also makes the most of it. After all, tracking Slack AI usage isn’t about Big Brother – it’s about empowering Big Growth, turning insights into action so your people and your business can work smarter, together. Track it, learn from it, and watch your teams thrive in the new AI-powered era of work.
