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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 humans 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 seems to be more than just a Dorsey passion project. According to its website, Buzz was built by Dorsey’s company Block, which also operates products like Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal.
we're launching BUZZ!a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes, built to reduce our dependency on slack and github. model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source. 🐝https://t.co/8IaMVeTQNo
As startups increasingly rely on AI agents to get work done, it can be challenging for employees to collaborate on various tasks across different platforms. Buzz’s utility is that it merges several different workflows into one workspace. It looks a lot like Slack, but with native AI agents and the ability to manage GitHub projects all from the same window.
Since the platform is open source, developers can make their own Buzz instance feel more customized to the needs and workflows of their specific team. If a team needs a new feature, they can build it and deploy it on their own, since they have full access to the source code.
Dorsey isn’t the only entrepreneur trying to pursue AI-native alternatives or additions to Slack. Paradigm partner and CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos recently unveiled a similar open source product called Centaur, which he describes as a “virtual employee” that runs either inside of Slack or via an API.
“There’s a lot of room for improvement for agents that live in Slack and can do more work than just coding for teams. In the enterprise setting, this means that you’ll want to self-host for security and control, and you want people to use it in Slack,” Konstantopoulos wrote on X.
Read our blog to get a deep dive on Why Centaur and How It Works.My TL;DR is that Centaur is the best way to AGI pill your team and to 100x your team's productivity.There's a lot of room for improvement for agents that live in Slack and can do more work than just coding for…
For newer startups that are using AI agents and don’t have an established presence on Slack, Buzz (or its competitors) could be worth investigating. But Buzz itself admits that it is in its “early stages,” so it’s probably not a good idea to port your team over just yet.
Buzz’s free desktop app is available now for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the code for the app has been uploaded to GitHub.
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Senior Writer
Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.
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