Using AI to build an automated Slack summary tool

Today, we're publishing a post by Keshav Jindal, who leads our daily newsletter content and operations.

Here at Ben's Bites, we’re building a thriving Slack community for our paid members. If you're reading this, you're probably part of it (if not, why not?). Every week, we have dozens of messages in different channels - people helping each other, solving problems, posting inspiring projects etc. This engagement is fantastic for community building. But as anyone with a community will know, keeping track of all this activity can be difficult.

The challenge: information overload

We launched our tutorials platform and Slack community earlier this year. Creating a weekly members’ digest email seemed like the perfect solution to help everyone (including ourselves) stay up-to-date on Slack activity without scrolling through a week's worth of messages.

We sent these digests manually to start with. We’d dig back through Slack posts and our CMS, literally copy-pasting new updates and content into a weekly email roundup.

We did it for one week, two weeks, three weeks… By the fourth week, we knew there had to be a better way.

So, being an AI tutorial platform, we did the obvious: set out to build an AI-powered tool to do the summaries for us.

From copy-paste drudgery to AI-powered magic

Here's how we went from manual labour to an automated process: