Feature Idea: Retrieve messages across channels for DMs with AI Assistant

[muratbayan]

Summary

Allow the AI Assistant to process posts in another/multiple other channels, ideally allowing me to DM the assistant and ask it to search/process posts

How important this is to me and why

I do not always want to interact with the AI assistant in the channel I need information from. I want to be able to have a DM with it to help me catch up, search, analyze activity happening across one or more channels, following up in a channel if needed

Importance: Medium

Use cases:

1. Get a summary of activity for very active channels based on the last X posts or since I last read a channel
2. Getting intelligent search across one or multiple channels to avoid having to process many posts "manually"

Additional context/similar features

This could be seen for use case 2 as an extension of the native search in Mattermost, allowing me to have a natural language search/discovery via the assistant. Big communities like the Mattermost community have too many channels and posts generated every day, summarizing them based on what I care about would be extremely helpful

[crspeller]

For context, the reason for this limitation is that channel mentions in DMs are ambiguous since there can be the same channel name in multiple teams. Town Square being the obvious example.

Not sure what the UX would be for resolving this discrepancy. @matthewbirtch Any ideas?

[matthewbirtch]

I think this is a great feature idea. I would find it so useful myself.

@crspeller there was work underway with this ticket to make the channel mentions autocomplete show channels across teams. It never got finished by the looks of it though. This would address the ambiguity when selecting from the autocomplete menu.

[crspeller]

Looks like there is a PR in progress https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost/pull/24137 If that is completed than I think that would solve this problem since ambiguous mentions would be annotated with a team name.