IBM Teams Up With Slack to Build Smarter Data-Crunching Chatbots - Bloomberg

Later in the article: "About 30,000 IBM employees use Slack’s messaging system, making it one of the San Francisco startup’s biggest customers." On a related note, see Microsoft could be unveiling Teams, its Slack competitor, next week (Ars Technica).

"IBM is teaming up with Slack Technologies Inc. to make it easier for companies to build custom chatbots into the startup’s workplace-messaging systems, the latest move by Big Blue to add more diverse business cases for its Watson artificial-intelligence technology.
The two companies will release a developer toolkit that includes Watson technologies and can integrate easily into Slack, they said in a statement Wednesday. International Business Machines Corp. will also build a chatbot -- a conversation-based application -- that will help IT departments identify and resolve issues without having to leave the Slack platform. The startup’s own customer-service bot will incorporate the Watson Conversation system, which includes technologies such as speech-to-text conversion and natural-language processing, or the ability for a computer to understand what a person is saying."

IBM Teams Up With Slack to Build Smarter Data-Crunching Chatbots - Bloomberg