Slack's Surfaces turn chat into a dashboard builder

Slack is blurring the line between chat and the BI tool.

Slackbot can now build interactive dashboards and reports inside your Slack chats. The feature, called Slackforce Surfaces, lets anyone in a workspace ask Slackbot for a tool in plain language — say, an arcade-themed visualization of AI token usage across sales, design, and engineering — and get back an interactive dashboard rather than a static chart. Surfaces can be shared with colleagues, pinned to channels, and commented on, and Slack says it will also work for things like a live customer-support queue dashboard or a financial forecast that pulls data from connected apps. Data access stays bounded: Surfaces only pull from apps the workspace's AI tools already have permission to reach.

Why it matters: this is the chat platform quietly eating the dashboard. Most teams already live in Slack; if the charts get generated where the questions are asked, the separate analytics tab starts to look optional. And note who can use it — Surfaces ships to all customers, including free workspaces with Slackbot enabled, with live-data support starting in October. That is a land-grab move aimed at everyday "how are we doing" questions, not analyst workflows, and it puts Slack in direct, if quiet, competition with the BI tools many companies still pay per seat for.

The catch is the same one that hangs over every vibe-coded internal tool: a dashboard someone prompted into existence in thirty seconds has no owner, no tests, and no guarantee the number on it is the right one. Slack's permission gating handles where data comes from, not whether the visualization is honest. Enterprises adopting this at scale will need the same data-governance habits they built for BI — just pointed at a chat window now.

What to watch: whether October's live-data launch stays free-tier, and how fast rivals like Teams answer with an equivalent — the chat-as-analytics-surface race should compress from quarters to weeks.

_Which would your team drop first — the BI tool or the spreadsheet exports? Tell us in the comments._

Brain organoids classified Braille at 83% — in a trio, not alone

Two stories today: human brain tissue on a chip decoded a tactile signal, and the data-centre company behind some of the largest AI contracts in Europe turns out to be six months behind on its flagship site. Human forebrain organoids grown on a microelectrode array classified Braille letters with 61 percent accuracy on their own and 83 percent when the responses of three organoids were combined, in a peer-reviewed study from the University of Bristol. The team took event-based tactile readings

Suleyman says Microsoft's base model beat OpenAI's on a quarter compute

Microsoft finished pre-training its biggest in-house model yet — then used it to make a point about the company it bankrolls. Microsoft AI completed pre-training of MAI-Base-2, a mixture-of-experts foundation model with 80 billion active and 2.8 trillion total parameters, and says the recipe is 4.2–12.3x more pre-training FLOPs-efficient than DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base. The run itself is the number worth keeping: 16,000 Nvidia GB200 GPUs for 38 days across August and September, at 21% average model

Amazon's new Bee devices listen all day — for $11.99 a month

Amazon turned its always-listening Bee line into a two-device family on Thursday, and NVIDIA opened a 2.8-trillion-token Indic corpus recipe. The connecting thread: both are bets that the next AI money is in memory — yours, or your model's. Amazon put two new always-listening devices on sale, and both now lead to a subscription. Bee Frontier, the next-generation wristband that also clips to clothing, ships now at $74.99 in Onyx, Lavender and Sage — up from the $50 predecessor — with seven-day

Perplexity open-sources its agent sandbox after 118 failed escapes

Perplexity handed its agent containment layer to the open-source world, and Washington's AI task force stopped reading briefings and started working. Perplexity open-sourced SPACE on Thursday — the sandbox it built to keep its own AI agents from getting out — and says nine frontier models failed to break out of it across 118 attempts. Each agent runs inside a small virtual machine with its own operating system, with credentials and network access managed outside the sandbox so an agent can re

Read more

Brain organoids classified Braille at 83% — in a trio, not alone

Suleyman says Microsoft's base model beat OpenAI's on a quarter compute

Amazon's new Bee devices listen all day — for $11.99 a month

Perplexity open-sources its agent sandbox after 118 failed escapes