The fastest way to make an AI integration useless is to route everything it produces into Slack on day one. The channel gets muted in a week and stays muted.
- ›What belongs in Slack
- ›What does not
- ›Approvals in Slack, done well
- ›Configuring it deliberately
What belongs in Slack
Things needing a decision from a specific person. Approvals, escalations, and direct questions. These interrupt appropriately because they are blocking.
Genuine exceptions. Something went wrong that someone must know about now.
Answers people asked for. Cortex responding to a question in a channel is useful because it was requested.
Digests, once a day. A single morning summary is better received than forty individual notifications, and it gets read.
What does not belong
Every record change. Nobody needs a message when a task status updates.
Routine AI output. Analyses and reports belong where they are read, not in a stream.
Anything nobody acts on. The test: has anyone ever taken an action because of this notification type? If not, remove it.
Sensitive data in shared channels. Compensation, performance, and personal information should not be routed into channels with broad membership, regardless of permission checks.
Approvals in Slack
This is the best use of a Slack integration, and it has two rules.
Route to a channel, not a DM, when more than one person can approve. A DM to a person in meetings blocks the work; a channel lets whoever is available act.
Include enough context to decide. What would change, on which record, and why the AI proposed it. If the approver has to open the app to understand, the integration saved nothing.
Approvals from Slack respect the same permission and audit machinery as approvals in the app, which is what makes this safe rather than a convenient bypass. See the approvals queue.
Configuring it deliberately
Start narrow, expand only on request:
Important: If a channel gets muted, the integration has failed regardless of how much it delivers. Muting is the signal to remove notification types, not to send them somewhere else.
Where Cortex in Slack helps
Asking a question in a channel and getting a grounded answer with citations is genuinely useful, particularly for questions that would otherwise interrupt a person: what is the status of this account, what did we agree on pricing, who owns this.
The answer respects the asker's permissions, so a channel answer shows only what that person may see.
FAQ
Should we replace Slack with in-platform messaging?
Only if you want to. Most teams keep Slack and connect it. What you should avoid is running both for the same conversations, which splits your history.
What about Microsoft Teams?
Teams is listed as coming soon in the integration catalog. Slack, Google Calendar, and Microsoft 365 are the connected integrations today.
How do we handle notification preferences per person?
Route by role and let individuals mute what they do not need. Central configuration plus individual control beats either alone.
Brainis connects to Slack for notifications, approvals, and Cortex answers, with permission-aware delivery. See the Slack integration.
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