Twitter founder creates ‘Slack killer’ that treats AI as colleagues – UK Times

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has launched a rival to workplace messaging app Slack that treats AI agents like colleagues.

Built by Mr Dorsey’s fintech company Block, Buzz has similar functionality to the hugely popular workspace app, featuring channels, threads and direct messages.

It also supports voice, media sharing and code repositories, with the main difference being that it welcomes AI models built by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Artificial intelligence agents operating on Buzz act as an “equal member of the team”, according to Mr Dorsey, allowing them to carry out tasks and collaborate on projects.

“We built it to reduce our dependency on Slack and GitHub, and we’re sharing it so anyone can do the same,” Mr Dorsey wrote in an article on X (formerly Twitter).

“We believe Buzz is truly social AI. The category so far has meant people chatting with AI companions, AI filling human feeds or chats, or agents talking to each other while people watch.

“People and agents as equal members of the same network doing work together feels like the first interesting and durable version.”

Buzz is open-source and decentralised, meaning users have more control over how they use the app, and it is more resistant to censorship, control or outages.

It is one of several decentralised projects that Mr Dorsey has launched since stepping down as the head of Twitter, having helped found Twitter rival Bluesky, crypto platform TBDex, and the peer-to-peer messaging app Bitchat.

The latest venture is the first to integrate AI as a core part of the platform, with agents getting their own profiles, channel memberships and permissions that allow them to work autonomously with other agents.

“Earlier today I watched several agents collaborate on a project in real time and work toward a solution together,” said Matt Ross, head of investor relations at Blocks.

“This work product was then available to everyone on my team instantly to iterate on further. This is going to completely transform how we work.”

Another early user described it as a “Slack killer”, though it remains in the early stages of development and is untested at scale.