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Slack’s assistant sidebar is a first-class surface for chatting with AI agents — and incident.io is one of them. Open the sidebar from anywhere in Slack and you can manage incidents, check who’s on call, search your incident history, and more, all without leaving your current channel. The assistant is context-aware: open it from an incident channel and it knows which incident you’re looking at, tailoring its responses and suggested prompts to your role and the incident lifecycle.

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How to open the assistant

  1. Click the agent/assistant icon in the top-right corner of Slack on desktop or in a browser.
  2. If multiple agents are installed, click the dropdown arrow and choose incident.io.
  3. Select a suggested prompt or type a message to get started.
  4. Use the clock icon to access your message history and resume previous conversations.
You can also start a conversation from the incident.io app home tab by clicking New chat or selecting the Chat tab.

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What you can do

The assistant works in two modes depending on where you open it.

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From anywhere in Slack

When you open the assistant from a non-incident channel, you get general mode — useful for day-to-day interactions with incident.io without needing to navigate away from what you’re doing. On-call and schedules Check and manage on-call schedules directly from the sidebar:
  • Who's on call for the platform team?
  • Show me my upcoming shifts this week
  • Put me on call for the next 2 hours
  • I need someone to cover my Friday shift
Declare incidents Start a new incident from the sidebar when something goes wrong:
  • Declare an incident — EU payments are failing
Search past incidents Find relevant incidents from your organisation’s history:
  • Have we seen login failures like this before?
  • Show me recent P1 incidents from the last month
Check service status Ask about monitored third-party services:
  • Is AWS reporting any issues right now?
Query your catalog Look up ownership and organisational data:
  • Which team owns the checkout service?

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From an incident channel

When you open the assistant while viewing an incident channel, it enters incident mode with full context about the incident — including the investigation, alerts, and conversation history. Everything you can do with @incident in a channel, you can do here in a private sidebar conversation. That means drafting updates, creating follow-ups, changing severity, assigning roles, and more. Suggested prompts adapt to your situation. An incident lead on a live incident sees options like “Draft a status update” and “Suggest next steps”, while a responder sees “Catch me up” and “What do we know?”.

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Enabling the Slack assistant

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Plan availability

The Slack assistant is available to Pro and Enterprise customers using Slack.

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Slack workspace configuration

Workspace owners and admins control whether the incident.io agent appears for members. This requires a paid Slack subscription (Pro, Business+, or Enterprise).
  1. Click Admin in the Slack sidebar.
  2. Select Apps and workflows to open the Slack Marketplace.
  3. Find incident.io in the Installed apps list.
  4. Click the App settings tab.
  5. Next to “AI agent experience”, click Edit.
  6. Select Enabled and click Save.
For Enterprise Grid workspaces, follow the same steps via Organisation settings → Integrations → Installed apps.
By default, app agents are displayed at the top of Slack once enabled by an admin. Individual members can control which agents they see via Preferences → Navigation → App agents & assistants.

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incident.io configuration

The Slack assistant requires the assistant:write OAuth scope. If your Slack integration was set up before the assistant feature was available, you may need to re-authorise the Slack app to pick up the new scope. New installations include it automatically. If it isn’t working for you, reach out to support and we can help get it enabled.

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FAQ

What’s the difference between this and @incident? The assistant sidebar and @incident mentions share the same underlying AI agent. The key difference is the surface: the sidebar gives you a private, persistent conversation that’s always one click away from anywhere in Slack. You don’t need to be in a specific channel, and your questions aren’t broadcast to everyone in the room. How do you use AI? Please find more details in this article. Does this work with private incidents? By default, all AI features are disabled in private incidents. You can opt in to AI features in private incidents via Settings → Security.