Jack Dorsey is taking on Slack with Buzz, a group chat platform for teams and their AI agents

Jack Dorsey doesn't do quiet product launches, and Buzz is no exception. On Tuesday the Twitter and Block co-founder unveiled a group chat platform built to let human employees and AI agents work in the same threads, the same channels, the same workspace. Dorsey's own pitch on X called it "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source," language that sounds more like a crypto manifesto than a workplace tool announcement — which, given Dorsey's track record, tracks.

Buzz comes out of Block, the company behind Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal, so this isn't some side hustle running on nights and weekends. The app looks and feels a lot like Slack at first glance, but it folds in native AI agents and GitHub project management into the same window. The idea is to stop employees from bouncing between five different tabs just to get a task done with an AI assistant's help. Because it's open source, teams can fork it, bend it, and bolt on whatever features their workflow actually needs instead of waiting for a roadmap decided by someone else.

Dorsey isn't alone in spotting this gap. Paradigm's Georgios Konstantopoulos recently shipped something called Centaur, a self-hostable "virtual employee" that lives inside Slack or plugs in via API, aimed at enterprises that want agent-driven productivity without giving up control over their data. Konstantopoulos framed it bluntly on X as a way to get teams AGI-pilled and dramatically more productive, and his emphasis on self-hosting for security suggests he's chasing the same enterprise anxieties Dorsey is betting on with decentralization.

The timing makes sense. AI agents are increasingly doing real chunks of work at startups, and stitching together separate chat apps, code repos, and bot integrations is a genuine headache. For a young company without years of Slack history baked into its culture, jumping to something agent-native from day one is a lot easier than for an enterprise with a decade of institutional muscle memory built around Slack channels.

Still, Buzz calls itself early-stage right on its own site, so nobody should be migrating a whole company over this week. The desktop app is free on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the source code sits on GitHub for anyone curious enough to poke around. Whether Buzz becomes a real Slack alternative or just another Dorsey experiment that fades into the background will depend on whether teams outside his orbit actually adopt it.