Jack Dorsey is taking on Slack with Buzz, a group chat platform for teams and their AI agents
Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey announced a new app on Tuesday called Buzz. Positioned as a challenger to Slack and GitHub, Buzz is a group chat platform for the workplace that puts people and their AI agents in the same conversations.
Dorsey wrote on X that Buzz is “model agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign and open source.” This product appears to be more than just a passion project for Dorsey. According to the website, Buzz was built by Dorsey’s company Block, which also operates products like Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Tidal.
As startups increasingly rely on AI agents to get their work done, it can be challenging for employees to collaborate on different tasks across platforms. The usefulness of Buzz is that it merges different workflows into one workspace. It’s a lot like Slack, but with native AI agents and the ability to manage GitHub projects all from the same window.
Because the platform is open source, developers can better customize their own Buzz instance to fit the needs and workflows of their specific team. If a team needs a new feature, they can build and deploy it themselves because they have full access to the source code.
Dorsey isn’t the only entrepreneur looking for AI-native alternatives or additions to Slack. Paradigm partner and CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos recently unveiled a similar open source product called Centaurwhich he describes as a “virtual employee‘that runs in Slack or via an API.
“There’s a lot of room for improvement for agents who live in Slack and can do more work than just coding for teams. In the enterprise environment, this means you want to self-host for security and control, and you want people to use it in Slack,” Konstantopoulos wrote on X.
For newer startups that use AI agents and don’t have an established presence on Slack, Buzz (or its competitors) may be worth investigating. But Buzz himself admits that it’s still in the “early stages,” so it’s probably not a good idea to move your team over just yet.
Buzz’s free desktop app is now available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the code for the app has been uploaded to GitHub.
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