Slack Helps NWS Strengthen Lifesaving Weather Response (Full Transcript)

[00:00:09] Speaker 1: Weather is a risk that can come up in seconds. The National Weather Service, it's a government agency. There's about 4,000 of us in over 150 locations, all the way from Puerto Rico to Guam. When your phone buzzes in the middle of the night with an alert, when a national hurricane center issues a hurricane warning, that comes from the National Weather Service. For decades, we've used a chat function. Looks a lot like instant messenger of yore. In severe weather events, when people needed us most, the system wasn't stable. That was a crisis for us. We had to find something new. We had to shift to a technology that enabled our partners to get to us any time they needed, to trust that we have it right, and for that collaboration to be tight. And that's when we brought in Slack and Salesforce.

[00:00:56] Speaker 2: There was a lot of excitement. People were loving the new features that Slack enables. To be able to put a picture, record a video, have a huddle, or summarize that information into a graphic. Moving to Slack has enabled us to get the information to our partners in time.

[00:01:20] Speaker 3: Back in March, we were analyzing the radar, maybe developing funnel cloud or a tornado. And sure enough, we started hearing the damage reports from our public safety partners, that there actually was a tornado on the ground. With Slackbot, the ability for it to read other systems that we use and pull information from there, summarize it, put it in a report, so we can visually show our partners what we're looking at. Well, directly within the path of this tornado was an elementary school, and it was near the end of the day. And as it was moving into the area, it was intensifying, and it was about time for all the kids to go home. They needed to take shelter right away. That instant direct communication that was being shared to the school officials through Slack, not only were they able to hold the kids and shelter them in the safety area, but they also were able to go outside and get all of the families out of the cars and into the school. The school did take a direct hit. Cars were a mess in the parking lot, but nobody was injured. The real-time communication that we have with our partners on Slack during an event has possibly saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.

[00:02:24] Speaker 1: As we see more extreme weather, people's lives are affected and at risk every single day. Slack gave us the trust and the technology to make sure that we were always there when our partners needed us. We're in a technological transformation within the weather service. Now in the agentic era, we're going to need to leverage the strongest software and AI capabilities. And our work with Slack and Salesforce was the first piece of that. Having a native AI capability within that whole software package really set us on a path for the technological revolution that we're going to see in the coming decades where we are AI-enabled and always deployed to where people need us. And that starts with Slack.