Claude 3.5 Sonnet - Is it a future Slack Slayer

Anthropic's latest release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet with its new Projects feature has the potential to transform how teams collaborate and represents a massive threat to established platforms like Slack.

The recent introduction of the Projects feature provides a practical and easy to use framework for AI-assisted collaboration. There are three key areas where Claude 3.5 Sonnet's Projects feature is set to make a substantial impact.

1. Enhanced Collaboration Through AI-Powered Workspaces

Unlike conventional platforms that merely facilitate communication, Claude 3.5 Sonnet actively participates in the collaborative process. Teams can now create dedicated AI-powered workspaces for specific projects, where Claude serves as both a central repository of information and an intelligent assistant.

Anyone familiar with Slack would know that they launched their own AI assistant in February this year. On initial uses though Claude’s latest release seems to far surpass Slack in terms of functionality and depth of AI integration. This is, of course, understandable to the extent that Claude has an AI first approach and Slack has built its platform primarily as a messaging application. Claude’s Projects feature seems very good at understanding context and providing relevant information.

A crucial component of this enhanced collaboration is the Artifacts feature. Artifacts allow team members to save and share specific outputs from their interactions with Claude. These can include generated text, code snippets, or analysis results.?

2. Collective Intelligence Through Shared AI Interactions

Allowing team members to share their individual conversations with Claude through Artifacts creates a unique form of collective intelligence that can drive more informed decision-making and foster creativity.

One of the common complaints of LLM’s is that the same prompts can generate different responses of varying relevance and benefit. By making these artifacts accessible to the entire team members of the team can effectively quality check a range of outputs and decide on the most useful to move forward with.

By sharing their interactions, team members can gain insights into different approaches to problem-solving, uncover new perspectives, and identify the most effective ways of leveraging Claude's capabilities. Team Leaders can also identify team members who are the best ‘prompt engineers’ within their organisation or those who might be best suited to particular projects involving the use of LLM’s in the future.

3. Customized AI Training with Company-Specific Knowledge

Another significant feature of Projects is the ability to upload existing company documents and train Claude on an organisation's specific style, tone, and knowledge base. This functionality addresses one of the primary concerns businesses have had about adopting AI tools - the lack of customization to their unique needs and culture.

By allowing Claude to learn from internal documents companies can better help the AI's outputs be aligned with their brand voice, industry-specific terminology and established processes. This is particularly valuable across various departments including sales, marketing, customer service and even HR.?

The ability to create a customised AI assistant that grows alongside the company represents a significant advantage over generic AI tools or traditional collaboration platforms. It ensures that the institutional knowledge accumulated over years is not only preserved but actively utilized to drive future success. This customised AI assistant will likely become increasingly more valuable to the company as it is trained with more and more of the company’s data.

The perceived pain of moving from messaging-first platforms like Slack will likely provide popular platforms an element of protection for now. This advantage of incumbency may, in the near future though, lead to them playing catch-up to more advanced AI-first platforms that are capable of gaining better and better understanding of a team and a company and therefore become more valuable to a company the more that it is utilised.? For companies considering a move, it will likely be a question of when this value outweighs the pain of moving to something new.