Jack Dorsey Launches Buzz, a Slack Rival Where AI Agents Work in Chat Alongside Humans

Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and head of Block, unveiled Buzz on July 21, 2026, a group chat platform for work teams in which AI agents take part in the conversation on equal footing with humans. The new product goes straight after Slack's territory.

What is Buzz

Buzz is a workplace messenger in which a single group chat brings together employees and their AI agents. According to TechCrunch, the idea is that agents stop being external bots and become ordinary participants in a work conversation, with access to the context of the discussion. Details on pricing, platforms and the public release date have not yet been disclosed.

The launch taps into the defining trend of 2026: companies are connecting AI agents to their workflows en masse, but have to manage them from scattered interfaces. Buzz proposes putting people and agents in one conversation window.

• The project's author is Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and head of Block
• Format: a group chat for work teams, a direct analog of Slack
• Key difference: AI agents are full participants in the conversation, not external integrations
• Competitors: Slack (owned by Salesforce) and Microsoft Teams
• Announcement date: July 21, 2026; the launch was reported by TechCrunch

"Buzz is a group chat platform for the workplace that puts people and their AI agents in the same conversation," is how

TechCrunch describes the product.

How Buzz differs from Slack

Buzz's central bet is that AI agents live inside the conversation rather than plugging in from outside. In Slack, automation has historically been built through bots, apps and webhooks: the agent remains an add-on layered over the chat. Buzz, judging by the description, flips that model: the agent reads the thread alongside the humans and replies in it, like one more colleague.

Slack, meanwhile, remains one of the most expensive assets in enterprise software: Salesforce bought the company for $27.7 billion, with the deal closing in July 2021. Challenging a player like that head-on is hard, so Dorsey is coming in through a new need: in 2026, teams increasingly work not only with each other but also with autonomous agents.

Salesforce is moving in the same direction itself: in 2024 the company launched Slack AI, and later announced its Agentforce agent platform. But those tools are built into the existing architecture, whereas Buzz, according to TechCrunch's description, was designed around agents from day one.

Why Dorsey is building a messenger again

Communication products are a through-line of Jack Dorsey's career. He co-founded Twitter (launched in 2006), in 2019 initiated the project inside Twitter that became the decentralized protocol Bluesky, supports the Nostr protocol, and in July 2025 released Bitchat, an experimental P2P messenger that works over Bluetooth without the internet.

Dorsey's interest in agents is systematic: his fintech company Block released Goose, an open-source framework for AI agents, back in January 2025. Buzz continues that series, but for the first time in a long while Dorsey is building a product for the enterprise market rather than for open protocols. The logic is clear: the market for workplace agents is growing, major AI labs shifted their focus in 2025–2026 from chatbots to agents that complete tasks end to end, and teams need a place where those agents can be managed conveniently.

What this means

The workplace messenger is turning from a channel for people to talk into a control point for a hybrid team of humans and AI agents. If Buzz's format catches on, competition with Slack will shift from channels and integrations to the quality of the built-in agents, and this is the first notable product built around that model from scratch. The question now is whether the newcomer can give teams enough reasons to leave their familiar corporate platform.