Slack is the noticeboard
One of the examples dassi suggests to new users reads “Every weekday at 9am, summarize my unread Gmail and send it to my team chat.” All the work in that sentence happens in Gmail. Slack is the noticeboard at the end of it, and for most small teams that’s the right job for Slack, since it’s where people already look and nobody has to go and open a dashboard or a shared inbox to find out what came in overnight. The routine behind that digest is written out in the Gmail inbox triage job.
Any scheduled job can finish with a post. After the Monday competitor price check, something like this lands in #pricing, with a link to the sheet underneath:
Price check, Mon 8:04. 11 of 12 unchanged. Competitor B has the large tote at $41, down from $45. One product page threw a CAPTCHA, so that row is blank and it’s on your list.
Figures from your dashboards can go out the same way as a weekly summary. In a team of four this mostly kills the Monday-afternoon “did the price check run?” message.
To-dos out of a sixty-reply thread
By Thursday the launch thread in #ops has sixty replies. Somewhere in there are the commitments, and nobody is going to scroll back through it to find them. dassi opens the thread from its link, reads every reply, and pulls out each commitment with the person who made it and a date if anyone gave one. It checks your tracker (a Google Sheet, Trello, whatever you use) before adding anything, so an item that was already logged on Tuesday doesn’t go in twice, and every new entry carries a link back to the Slack message it came from. Then it drafts a reply in the thread listing the items and owners.
Threads that never actually settled who’s doing what are common. Tell it to put those items in an “unowned” pile rather than hand them to whoever spoke last, which is what a tired human does.
Posting as you
dassi uses Slack in your browser, signed in as you. There’s no bot account. Anything it posts shows up under your name and your photo, which is why the thread reply above waits for your approval, and why I’d end it with a note saying a dassi run wrote it.
The CAPTCHA line in that price post is the other half of this. dassi stops when it reaches something only a person can decide (a refund outside your policy, a supplier quote wildly off last month’s) and asks you, in dassi, on your own machine. Copying those open questions into a channel gets them to whoever owns the decision that morning. The approval still happens in dassi, though, and a thumbs-up emoji under a refund question looks an awful lot like a yes, so say that to the team once.
Limits
It works with Slack on the web at app.slack.com, not the desktop app, and sees whatever your account sees, DMs included. Thread text goes to the AI model you chose, through dassi’s relay if you’re on included credits, so leave sensitive DMs out. Slack’s free plan hides anything older than 90 days and dassi can’t read past that. Workspace rules about automated posting apply. Be slower still with Slack Connect channels, where another company is reading. Scheduled runs need your browser open when the 9am digest is due.
I’m not sure yet how every team will feel about a digest that turns up under a colleague’s name each morning.