OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap calls the AI giant the ‘world’s most active Slack user’

• Brad Lightcap said that OpenAI has “the world’s most active users of Slack internally.”
• OpenAI recently launched a workplace suite, which Lightcap said complements other tools like Slack and Salesforce.
• A former OpenAI engineer previously wrote that “everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack.”

OpenAI employees are Slacking up a storm.

While AI companies say they’re radically changing how we work, from work to messaging to cutting head count entirely, OpenAI is sticking with one classic workplace tool — and they use it a lot.

OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said his company had high-frequency Slackers on Fortune’s “Term Sheet” podcast.

“We are probably the world’s most active users of Slack internally at OpenAI,” Lightcap said.

OpenAI’s sales team also “runs on” Salesforce, Lightcap said. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2020 for $27.7 billion.

Both Salesforce and Slack are SaaS platforms — as in, software-as-a-service. This is an area that many new AI companies are jumping into, including OpenAI itself. The company released a new suite of workplace tools in October, including an inbound sales assistant and a contract searcher.

Within the company, however, OpenAI sticks with some SaaS stalwarts.

“We use kind of all the canonical SaaS systems you can think of,” Lightcap said. “These are really, really important systems for OpenAI, and I think they’re going to be really, really enduring and important systems for a while.”

In a July blog post, former OpenAI engineer Calvin French-Owen described the company’s operations, including its reliance on Slack over email.

“An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack,” Calvin French-Owen wrote.

“There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there,” he continued.

If AI isn’t the great Slack replacer, where does it fit in? Lightcap said on the podcast that it can “live in the cracks” within these systems and their workflows. That would make everyone work faster, he said.

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