Overview
In Canny Ideas, the Slack integration lets your team create ideas, add Insights on behalf of customers, and send messages to Autopilot for ideas extraction — all without leaving Slack.
The Slack integration is available on all plans.
Setting up Slack for Ideas
An admin with permission to manage integrations is required to install Slack in Canny.
⚠️ If you connected Slack before Ideas was enabled on your account, reinstall the integration from the Slack settings page to access Ideas features (including the option to include a full thread when sending to Autopilot).
Configure your Ideas settings from the Slack page in Canny:
Send new ideas to Portal — toggle on to automatically publish ideas to the portal when they're submitted from Slack.
Insights priority required — toggle on to require a priority to be set when adding an Insight from Slack.
Ideas fields required — toggle which custom idea fields must be filled in when creating an idea from Slack.
Creating ideas from Slack
Use the Submit feedback shortcut or Add to existing feedback shortcut in Slack to create a new idea or add an Insight to an existing one. The Submit feedback shortcut is available in two places: as a message action (under the "more actions" menu on a specific Slack message) and as a global shortcut (from the shortcuts menu / "+" menu).
You can create feedback on behalf of a company or user when:
Creating a new idea
Creating an Insight on an existing idea
Sending a message to Autopilot
The /canny slash command also allows Insights to be added.
Autopilot deduplication runs on all Slack submissions — including ideas created directly from a Slack shortcut — so you don't end up with duplicate ideas when the same request comes in twice.
Sending messages to Autopilot
Use the Send to Autopilot for Canny message shortcut on any message. The message is sent to Autopilot for feature-request extraction, and approved suggestions create ideas on your Ideas dashboard. By default, the idea is attributed to the author of the message, but you can select an alternate author when sending.
When sending a threaded message, you can optionally include the full thread for additional context. This option requires reinstalling the Slack integration if you connected before this feature shipped.
See Autopilot — Ideas for full details on how Autopilot processes these messages.
Notifications
Slack delivers two idea-related direct messages:
Idea owner assignment — when an admin assigns you as the owner of an idea, you receive a Slack DM.
Idea marked complete — when an idea moves to a Complete status, account owners of any company linked to the idea via insights receive a Slack DM.
Both DMs are controlled at the workspace level. See Slack notifications for idea owners and account owners for details.
💡 Note: If you also have a portal alongside Ideas, channel notifications for portal events (new posts, votes, status changes, etc.) continue to fire as configured. See Slack Integration — Portal for setup details.
Things to note
Ideas created from Slack are internal by default. They are only published to the portal if you have Send new ideas to Portal enabled, or if you manually publish them.
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