Several People Are Tuning: Data and Machine Learning at Slack: Slack has only been publicly available for a little over two years, but during that time we have been able to create one of the most interesting data sets in the world about how teams form, grow, and collaborate in order to get things done. Our next great challenge is to find ways to leverage what we’ve learned in order to help people find the information they need faster and to help large organizations work together more effectively.
Although our mission is broad, we are still at the very start of our journey; our machine learning team was only created six months ago, and our data team just six months before that. I would like to talk for a bit about what that journey has been like: how we hired our team, how we chose our tools and developed our initial data infrastructure and machine learning models, and how we’ve framed the product problems that we’re trying to solve.