Jack Dorsey Takes on Slack with Buzz, a Group Chat Platform for Teams and AI Agents

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Block, announced a new app called Buzz on Tuesday. Positioned as a competitor to Slack and GitHub, Buzz is a group chat platform for the workplace that brings humans and their AI agents into the same conversations. Dorsey wrote on X that Buzz is “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.”

According to its website, Buzz was built by Dorsey’s company Block, which also operates Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal. As startups increasingly rely on AI agents to get work done, collaborating across different platforms can be challenging. Buzz merges multiple workflows into one workspace – it looks similar to Slack but includes native AI agents and the ability to manage GitHub projects from the same window. Being open source, developers can customize their own Buzz instance for their team’s needs.

Dorsey is not the only entrepreneur pursuing AI-native alternatives 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 inside Slack or via an API.

Buzz admits it is in its “early stages,” so a full team migration is not yet advisable. The free desktop app is available now for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with the code uploaded to GitHub.