Jack Dorsey launches Buzz, open-source Slack rival with native AI agents

On Tuesday, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Block, announced Buzz, a new group chat platform designed to bring humans and AI agents into the same workplace conversations. Building on his experience running Block — a financial services company that also owns Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal — Dorsey positioned Buzz as a direct challenger to Slack and GitHub. In a post on X, Dorsey described Buzz as "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source."

The core insight behind Buzz is that as startups increasingly rely on AI agents to complete work, employees face friction collaborating across multiple platforms. Slack handles team chat, GitHub manages code and projects, and AI tools live in separate windows or plugins. Buzz attempts to solve this by consolidating these workflows into a single interface. The platform looks visually similar to Slack but includes native AI agents and the ability to manage GitHub projects without switching applications.

A key differentiator is Buzz's open-source architecture. Unlike Slack, where teams submit feature requests to a centralized product team, Buzz grants developers full access to the source code. Teams can build custom features tailored to their workflows and deploy their own instances, eliminating dependency on a third-party vendor. This appeals to organizations with specific security, compliance, or operational needs.

Buzz is not alone in this space. Georgios Konstantopoulos, a partner and CTO at Paradigm, recently unveiled Centaur, a similar open-source product he describes as a "virtual employee" that operates either inside Slack or via an API. Konstantopoulos wrote that there is "a lot of room for improvement for agents that live in Slack and can do more work than just coding," and highlighted the enterprise appeal of self-hosting for security and control.

The free Buzz desktop app is available immediately for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with the source code published on GitHub. However, the creators acknowledge that Buzz is still in its early stages, cautioning potential users against immediately migrating their teams. For newer startups building around AI agents that lack an established Slack presence, Buzz or its competitors may offer a compelling alternative — but the market is still forming.

The emergence of Buzz reflects a broader shift in how teams think about AI integration in workplace tools. As AI agents move from experimental to operational, centralized platforms like Slack face pressure to evolve faster than they have historically. Dorsey's emphasis on Buzz being "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source" directly signals a response to that gap — teams want flexibility to choose which AI models to use and control over their data and infrastructure.

The open-source model is particularly notable because it inverts the traditional software-as-a-service relationship. Rather than requesting features from Slack's product team, organizations can modify Buzz themselves. This appeals to enterprises with specific security or workflow requirements, as noted by Georgios Konstantopoulos's comment on Centaur (a competing open-source product): "In the enterprise setting, this means that you'll want to self-host for security and control." For startups already built around AI agents, Buzz or competitors like Centaur may present a lower-friction entry point than adopting Slack and bolting on separate AI tools.

However, Buzz's admission that it is in its "early stages" tempers immediate adoption risk. The competitive landscape is still forming — Paradigm's Centaur and other entrants are pursuing similar niches — suggesting that the ultimate winner in AI-native workplace collaboration is not yet clear.

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