How to get a weekly summary of a Slack channel

Mihir Ahuja 2026-10-26 7 minute read

To get a weekly summary of a Slack channel, you have five options. On Slack Pro or higher, use Summarize channel and pick the last seven days, which is on demand and visible only to you. On Business+, add the channel to Recaps for an automatic daily digest, or build a Slackbot skill. For a summary that posts to the channel every week for everyone, use an AI coworker invited to the channel, or build a small internal Slack app that reads the history and calls a model. The right choice depends on whether the summary is for you or for the team.

Which ways can you summarize a Slack channel each week?

Ways to get a weekly Slack channel summary
Option	Plan needed	Automatic?	Who sees it	Best for
Summarize channel (Slack AI)	Pro, Business+, Enterprise+	No, you run it	Only you	Catching up after time off
Recaps (Slack AI)	Business+, Enterprise+	Yes, every morning	Only you	Following channels you don't post in
Slackbot skill	Business+ for ongoing use	Up to three automatic task runs a day	The person who runs it	A personal weekly digest in your own format
Internal Slack app + model	Any	Yes, on your schedule	Whoever you post it to	Teams with a developer
AI coworker in the channel	Depends on the tool	Yes, scheduled	The whole channel	A shared weekly update

Verified Oct 2026 (October 26) against Guide to AI features in Slack, Slackbot limits, conversations.history, and Slack's rate limit changes for non-Marketplace apps.

How do you summarize the last week of a Slack channel with Slack AI?

Open the channel, click the three-dot icon at the top of the conversation, and choose Summarize channel. Slack lets you summarize unread messages, the last seven days, or a custom date range on desktop (Slack Help). Click the More details icon to see which messages the summary drew on.

Conversation summaries are included on Pro, Business+, and Enterprise+. The limits: you have to remember to run it, the summary is only visible to you, and it covers what you can see in Slack, not the email or tracker behind the conversation.

Can Slack send you a daily or weekly channel summary automatically?

Daily, yes. Recaps, on Business+ and Enterprise+, sends you a summary every morning of what happened the previous day in the channels you choose. If you are away for a while, the recap covers the days you missed (Slack Help). Many people add busy channels to Recaps and mute them.

There is no weekly setting described for Recaps. For a weekly digest in your own format, a Slackbot skill is the closer fit, within Business+ limits: 15 Slackbot messages per member per week and three automatic task runs a day (Slackbot limits).

How do you build your own weekly channel summary bot?

If someone on the team writes code, a small internal app works on any Slack plan:

Create a Slack app for your own workspace with the channels:history scope (and groups:history for private channels), plus chat:write to post.
Once a week, call conversations.history with an oldest timestamp seven days back, and conversations.replies for threads.
Send the messages to a model with a fixed prompt: decisions, done, open questions, blocked, next week, with links back to the threads.
Post the result to the channel, or to a private channel first so a person can check it.

One detail matters here. Slack lowered the limits on conversations.history and conversations.replies for commercially distributed apps that are not in the Slack Marketplace: one request per minute, 15 messages per request. Internal apps you build for your own workspace keep the higher limits of 50+ requests a minute and up to 1,000 messages per request (Slack changelog). Build it as an internal app, and keep the model's data handling in mind before you send it private channels.

What should a good weekly channel summary look like?

A summary is only useful if people can act on it. Ask for fixed sections, keep each line to one fact, and always say where it came from:

*#client-acme: week of Oct 19*
*Decisions:* launch date moved to Nov 4 (agreed in thread with Priya, Tue)
*Done:* homepage copy approved; tracking pixels installed
*Open questions:* who signs off on the pricing page? (asked Thu, no reply)
*Blocked:* waiting on brand assets from the client
*Next week:* QA pass Mon, client review call Wed
*Sources:* 4 threads, 37 messages

Two rules make the difference: separate decisions from discussion, and list open questions with who asked and when, since those are what fall through the cracks. The client status update template uses the same structure for client channels.

How can an AI coworker post the summary to the whole channel?

Slack AI and Slackbot summarize for the person asking. If you want one summary that everyone in #client-acme or #ops sees every Monday, the agent has to be a member of the channel and post there on a schedule.

Geniusly is an AI coworker for your team in Slack. It reads the accounts you connect (Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Slack, GitHub, Linear, and Google Ads) and prepares a brief, report, status update, or handoff for a person to review. Connected apps are read-only by default, except Google Sheets edits you explicitly ask for, and Slack messages beyond its reply are posted only after your approval. Anyone in a channel it has been invited to can ask it for work, it can run a task once, daily, or weekly, and it has a Free plan. You invite it to the channel, then ask something like "Every Monday at 9, summarize the last week in this channel: decisions, done, open questions, blocked, next week." It replies in the conversation where you asked, and you can add context from Gmail, Linear, or GitHub so the summary covers work that happened outside Slack. See how to automate weekly status reports in Slack for the full setup and the weekly operations brief for an example.

Get started with Geniusly free →

Frequently asked questions

Can Slack summarize a channel for the last week?

Yes, on Pro, Business+, and Enterprise+. Use Summarize channel and choose the last seven days, unread messages, or a custom date range on desktop. The summary is only visible to you.

Does Slack send automatic channel summaries?

Recaps on Business+ and Enterprise+ send you a daily summary every morning for channels you choose. There is no weekly option described in Slack's help center, and the recap is personal, not posted to the channel.

Is there a free way to get a weekly Slack channel summary?

Slack's AI feature table lists conversation summaries on Pro and above. On the Free plan, you can build an internal Slack app that reads channel history and calls a model on a schedule, or use a third-party agent with a free plan.

Why do some Slack apps struggle to read channel history?

Since May 2025, commercially distributed apps that are not in the Slack Marketplace are limited to one conversations.history request per minute and 15 messages per request. Marketplace apps and internal apps you build for your own workspace keep higher limits.