Companies from Microsoft and Bloomberg to Expensify and Dropbox rely on Stack Overflow for Teams for knowledge-sharing and collaboration. Our platform facilitates the collection, curation, and dissemination of institutional knowledge. Familiar to developers and easy to embed into technical workflows, it closes the distance between people and the knowledge they need.

Now, we’re leveraging the power of GenAI to connect people with that knowledge even faster. OverflowAI is a GenAI-powered add-on module for Stack Overflow for Teams that does the heavy lifting required to discover and distill information into a coherent, insightful answer. It combines the innovative power of GenAI with Stack Overflow’s trusted knowledge management platform, improving developer experience and accelerating time to value.

What’s launching?

OverflowAI is a module with three features: Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code, Enhanced Search, and Auto-Answer App for Slack and Microsoft Teams. Independently and in harmony, they’ll help your teams work more productively, freed from a lot of toil and uncertainty.

Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code (IDE extension)

Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code lets developers search and post content to their company’s Teams site and to the public Stack Overflow site directly from their IDE (integrated development environment). Stack Overflow for VS Code also allows devs to access and learn from both AI- and human-generated content simultaneously.

There’s no need for costly context-switching to find answers; developers can look for or contribute content to Stack Overflow for Teams and stackoverflow.com without being jerked out of their productive flow.

The time and mental energy saved in the moment might seem minimal, but those savings mount over time, leading to more engaged developers who are less likely to suffer from burnout.

Problems solved:

• To find the answers they’re looking for, developers have to leave their IDE, disrupting their flow state. These interruptions cost productivity and erode developer happiness.
• Users rely on AI-generated code that lacks business context and hasn’t been verified by humans. AI CodeGen tools certainly have their advantages, but research shows that overreliance on these tools can lead to code churn and tech debt.

Benefits:

• Developers can find answers to their questions seamlessly, without so much as opening a new tab. Protecting flow state not only makes devs more productive; it makes them more content and fulfilled at work.
• Users can instantly validate the accuracy and trustworthiness of AI-generated responses, without worrying that hallucinations will creep into the equation.

Enhanced Search

Enhanced Search on Stack Overflow for Teams uses GenAI to help people ask better questions and find the best answers. It understands not only what users are asking, but what they really need to know—and where to find that information. Enhanced Search shortens the time required to articulate your question before aggregating and summarizing the most relevant results.

With Enhanced Search, users can enter their questions directly into the search box and receive AI-generated summaries based on pre-existing questions, answers, and other content. Those responses will include sources and citations, so humans can validate the quality of the responses, and users can offer feedback to support reinforcement learning. Answers are formatted to make it easy for users to parse the content and evaluate the sources.

To deliver more comprehensive answers in less time, Enhanced Search now summarizes results from the global Stack Overflow community alongside your private community insights.

Problems solved:

• Developers waste time sifting through search results to find the best answer, disrupting their focus and negatively impacting their productivity.
• Users must assess the quality or reliability of AI-generated responses; they can’t be sure if the AI is hallucinating.

Benefits:

• Developers get more relevant answers faster, helping them sidestep blockers and make more progress on their projects without wasting time searching for answers or interrupting their colleagues to ask for help.
• Devs get a better understanding of how their code works and learn new approaches they might not have considered.

Auto-Answer App

The third feature of OverflowAI is the Auto-Answer App for Slack or Microsoft Teams that automatically searches a customer’s Stack Overflow for Teams instance and returns answers within the chat platform—without requiring user actions like @ or / commands or accessing integrations. This feature scales community knowledge and automates the process of searching for knowledge, answering questions, and correcting inaccurate answers.

Just like Stack Overflow for VS Code, this integration gives devs access to insights from your knowledge community without the need for context-switching that costs time and energy. A familiar and intuitive chat interface makes it simple to ask the AI a question and get your answer—instead of pinging a colleague, which interrupts their flow and leaves you waiting (who knows how long!) for an answer.

Problems solved:

• Senior developers waste time answering the same question over and over when a perfectly good answer, rooted in business context and validated by human experts, already exists in the knowledge base.
• Colleagues searching for solutions interrupt one another’s work with questions because they’re unable to self-serve the answers they need.

Benefits:

• Sources and surfaces information in the flow of work, minimizing the need for context-switching.
• Tunes out distractions, reduces noise, and cuts down on the time users spend asking and answering repeat questions.
• The friendly, accessible chat interface makes it easy for new team members to get answers that have been documented by more seasoned developers and engineers.
• Employees can onboard and upskill themselves more quickly and independently.

The value of Overflow AI

OverflowAI enables you to tap into your organization’s collective wisdom while keeping the number of clicks and new tabs to a minimum. The solutions your developers need are often accessible outside of their flow of work, and they require the ability to search for solutions within those workflows—in their IDE, in developer portals, in chats. OverflowAI not only delivers that, but it also helps devs find answers faster by providing a search layer capable of understanding their intent and providing AI-generated summaries.

In short, OverflowAI helps connect technologists to solutions faster, reducing the cognitive burden of searching for technical and institutional knowledge by surfacing and sourcing answers right in the environments devs work in.