Slack Technologies hires former VP of Foursquare, Noah Weiss to lead its Search, Learning and Intelligence group. A growing users of its Slack team communication and messaging app makes the needs for data searching is important. Noah Weiss is the right man to begin with its exploration on the technology.
Noah Weiss was a former product manager at Google New York City since 2008, working on web search and ads before he joined Foursquare in 2011 as senior vice president of product management. During his tenure in Google, he was product leader for the structured data web search team, where he helped launch Google's Knowledge Graph. In Foursquare Weiss is in charge of product management and analyst teams across consumer features and monetization.
He will lead a new division, Search, Learning, & Intelligence group for Slack Technologies, and start the new New York office. Its focus in Slack is to build a bigger and better company with top-of-the-line information retrieval system based on neuro-linguistic programming and artificial intelligence technologies to analyze its content.
Business Insider quoted Noah Weiss regarding his role and responsibilities in Slack in his posting in Medium technology community, "The focus is on building features that make Slack better the bigger a company is and the more it uses Slack. The success of the group will be measured in how much more productive, informed, and collaborative Slack users get — whether a company has 10, 100, or 10,000 people."
As for now, Slack has more than 2 million active users who use its app on a daily basis. Its users activity has generated a loaded amount of data. Therefore an information retrieval system along with artificial intelligence system will help the company and its users to structure the data and conducting content analysis.
According to Venture Beat, other companies have also started to establish artificial intelligence to analyze user content. Snapchat has formed its research team last year, also Flipboard and Pinterest with their image recognition capability research. Other established companies such as Baidu, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have been the front runner of artificial intelligence research area.
In his email to Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal quoted what Weiss think about AI, "Applied AI in the enterprise will become an entire industry over the next decade and our priority is encouraging this evolution, whether those products come from us or others."
"Given the vast amount of information that flows through Slack and its focus on productivity, we think it provides the right conditions to make breakthroughs with AI, both through internal efforts and external contributions. We'll continue to encourage, engage with, and support third party developers in this area," he added
Noah Weiss and his experience in working on web search and structured web data in both Foursquare and Google will benefit Slack Technologies. Weiss will work in a new Slack Technologies New York's office starting January 2016.
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