Twitter and Block co-founder Jack Dorsey on Tuesday announced a new app called Buzz. Positioned as a challenger to Slack and GitHub, Buzz is a group chat platform for the workplace that allows humans and their AI agents to participate in the same conversation.
Dorsey wrote in X that Buzz is “model agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.” It looks like this product isn’t just Dorsey’s passion project. Buzz is built by Dorsey’s company Block, which also operates products such as Square, Cash App, Afterpay and Tidal, according to the company’s website.
As startups increasingly rely on AI agents to get work done, it can become difficult for employees to collaborate on different tasks across different platforms. The utility of Buzz is that it allows you to merge several different workflows into one workspace. It looks a lot like Slack, but has a native AI agent and the ability to manage your GitHub projects all from the same window.
Because the platform is open source, developers can make their own Buzz instances more customized to fit their specific team’s needs and workflows. When teams need new functionality, they have full access to the source code so they can build and deploy it themselves.
Dorsey isn’t the only entrepreneur looking to pursue AI-native alternatives and additions to Slack. Paradigm partner and CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos recently announced a similar open source product called Centaur. He describes this as a “virtual employee” that runs within Slack or via an API.
“There is a lot of room for improvement in an agent that lives in Slack and can do more than just code for your team. In an enterprise environment, this means self-hosting for security and control, and you want your users to use it in Slack,” Konstantopoulos wrote in X.
For emerging startups that use AI agents and don’t have an established presence on Slack, Buzz (or its competitors) may be worth investigating. However, Buzz itself admits that it’s still in its “early stages,” so it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to port your team over just yet.
Buzz’s free desktop app is currently available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the app code has been uploaded to GitHub.
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