# An AI assistant for Slack that can actually do the thing > The difference between answering and acting. How it works, what it looks like in a channel, and what Ray does not do here. Source: https://heyray.io/use-cases/slack-ai-assistant An assistant tells you what to do. Ray does it, once you say yes. Summaries and answers are the easy half. The work is what comes after: filing it, chasing it, updating the record, telling the client. Ray does that half, in the tools your team already uses, and shows you exactly what it is about to do before it does it. ## How it goes now - You can get a good summary of a thread and still have to do everything the thread was about. - The assistant knows what is in Slack and nothing about the tools where the work actually lives. - Anything that can act either acts without asking, which nobody trusts, or needs a workflow built in advance for each thing it might do. - Every tool that could help needs somebody to go and open it. ## How it actually works 1. **It reads the room, not just the message.** Ray is a member of the channels you invite it to and follows them. Mentions work, and so does simply describing something that needs doing. 2. **It reaches your tools, not a copy of them.** Trackers, docs, CRM, email, calendars, analytics and billing. Reads run freely, because reading is not the dangerous part. 3. **Anything that changes the world waits.** Writes, sends and money show you a card with the exact content first, including the full text of an email. There is no setting that turns that off. 4. **It remembers your team.** How you name things, who owns what, which project a nickname refers to. That memory belongs to the workspace and it stays when people leave. ## What that looks like in a channel **"Summarise this thread and file whatever needs filing."** Ray answers with the summary straight away, then shows you a card for the ticket it wants to create, because one of those is a read and the other is not. Tools: Linear, Jira, Asana, Notion **"Email the client the recap."** Ray drafts it and shows you the recipient, the subject and the verbatim body. Nothing sends until somebody taps Approve. Tools: Gmail, Outlook, HubSpot **"How many people search for standup bot?"** Ray looks it up with real keyword data rather than guessing, which is a read, so it just answers. Tools: Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PostHog ## The tools this touches Linear, Jira, Asana, Notion, Gmail, HubSpot, GitHub, Stripe, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Zendesk, Figma Every one has its own page saying what Ray reads there and what waits for an approval. The full set is at https://heyray.io/integrations.md ## What Ray does not do here - Ray is not a chatbot you configure with workflows and triggers. If you want a builder with branches and conditions, an automation tool is the better fit and we say so on the comparison pages. - It cannot see channels it has not been invited to, and there is no way to give it a view of the whole workspace at once. - Of the tools Ray connects, some are read-only, and each integration page states exactly what Ray can and cannot do there. - Ray is on Slack today. Discord, Teams and Google Chat are planned rather than shipped. ## What it costs Free covers 25 tasks a month plus a one-time 50-task starter grant that never expires. Pro is one flat price for your team size: $49 a month for 1 to 3 people, $99 a month for 4 to 10 people, $199 a month for 11 to 25 people. No seats, and using Ray more never costs more. Failed work is never counted and never billed. ## What people ask first **How is this different from Slack's own AI?** Slack AI is very good at Slack, which is the boundary. It summarises and searches the workspace. It does not open your tracker, file the ticket or send the email. The comparison page goes through it properly. **What stops it doing something it should not?** Two things. Anything that writes, sends or spends waits for a person to approve it, with the exact content shown. And Ray acts through each person's own connected accounts, so it can never do something in a tool that the person approving it could not do themselves. **Does it read everything we say?** It reads the channels you invite it to, the way a colleague in those channels would. It is deliberately quiet: most conversation needs nothing done about it, and Ray stays out of it. **Do we have to buy seats for everyone?** No. There are no seats. One flat price for the team size, and everyone in the workspace can use it. **Which model is it?** The same model on every tier, and we never quietly downgrade a cheaper plan to a weaker one.