Cortex AI Assistant in Slack (Private Beta)

We're excited to announce a private beta for Cortex’s AI assistant, available through Slack. It puts all the data in Cortex at your fingertips, without having to leave where you work or having to find the data yourself in the UI. It provides the same access to your Cortex workspace as the Cortex MCP, enabling natural language queries about your services, teams, Scorecards, Initiatives, and more without leaving Slack.

It can answer simple questions like “what services does my team own?” or "who's on-call for payments-api?” or "what's the production readiness score for checkout-service?" but it can also do so much more. Here are a few prompt examples for you to get started with!

• What are the patterns of incidents on my team over the last 2 quarters? What areas do you recommend we invest in to improve the reliability of our services?

• Give me a summary of everything I worked on and my key accomplishments over the last quarter

• Has there been an increase in PR sizes recently? Does that correlate with longer review times?

• What is our deployment frequency for the last 30 days across the services I own? Are there any patterns that may be causing that to change compared to the last quarter?

How it works

When you mention @Cortex in a Slack channel or direct message, the AI assistant:

1. Interprets your natural language query

2. Determines which Cortex API endpoints to call

3. Retrieves the relevant data from your Cortex workspace

4. Returns a formatted response in Slack

The AI assistant is currently read-only, so it can query information from Cortex but cannot make changes or write data.

Threading and conversation context

The Cortex AI assistant supports threaded conversations, allowing you to ask follow-up questions that build on prior context within the same thread. How it works:

• Start a conversation: Mention @Cortex in any private channel or directly to the @cortex app in the with your initial question. The bot responds in a thread.

• Ask follow-ups in the thread: Reply in the same thread with additional questions. The AI assistant retains context from the conversation, so you can drill down without repeating information.

• Each thread is a separate conversation: Context is scoped to the thread. Starting a new top-level message begins a fresh conversation with no prior context.

Available capabilities

The Cortex AI assistant can access the same set of Cortex API endpoints as the Cortex MCP:

Capability	Description
Entity details	Look up ownership, metadata, and custom data for any entity
Entity descriptors	View and list entity descriptors (YAML definitions)
Dependencies	List incoming and outgoing dependencies for an entity
On-call	Check who is currently on-call for an entity
Scorecards	List Scorecards, view scores, and get next-step recommendations
Initiatives	List and inspect Initiatives and their progress
Relationships	Explore entity relationships and relationship types
Team details	View team membership, sourcing, and contact channels
Workspace context	Query "my" entities and how they perform against Scorecards
Eng Intelligence metrics & traces	Query DORA metrics, incident trends, PR data, and other engineering performance indicators

Providing feedback

After each response, the AI assistant displays reaction emoji options. You can react with 👍 or 👎 to provide feedback on the quality of the answer. This feedback helps improve the responses over time.

Best Practices

Crafting effective prompts

The same best practices that apply to the Cortex MCP apply to the AI assistant:

• Be specific: "Show me all critical services failing the Production Readiness Scorecard" yields more actionable results than "tell me about services."

• Reference your organization's constructs by name: Mention specific Scorecards, Initiatives, teams, and entities by their Cortex tags or names.

• Use follow-up questions to drill down: Start broad in your initial message, then narrow in the thread.

• Combine related questions: "Who owns orders-api, what Scorecards is it evaluated against, and what's its current score?" works well as a single prompt.

See the Cortex MCP Prompt Library for a full list of prompt patterns organized by role.

Troubleshooting and FAQ

For details on configuring the Cortex AI assistant, visit Cortex Slack App for instructions.

The AI assistant isn't responding to my messages. Ensure @Cortex has been invited to the channel. The AI assistant works in public and private channels, but does not work in DMs. Make sure your slack identity is also mapped. Learn more here.

The AI assistant lost context from earlier in the thread. Very long threads may exceed the conversation context window. If this happens, start a new thread and re-state the relevant context in your first message.

Can I make changes to Cortex via the AI Assistant in Slack? No. The AI Assistant is read-only and only handles GET requests. It cannot modify or write data in your Cortex workspace. It can however, provide guidance and syntax on using our API or updating data to help you make any changes!