Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Block, announced Buzz, a new group chat platform for workplace teams that integrates humans and AI agents. Built by Block (owner of Square, Cash App, etc.), Buzz is described as model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source. It aims to reduce dependency on Slack and GitHub by merging group chat, AI agent collaboration, and GitHub project management into one interface.

Buzz arrives as startups increasingly rely on AI agents for diverse tasks, making cross-platform collaboration cumbersome. By being open source, teams can customize their own Buzz instance and deploy new features directly. The free desktop app is available now for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with code on GitHub. However, Buzz itself admits it is in early stages, so teams should be cautious about full migration.

Dorsey is not alone in pursuing AI-native alternatives to Slack. Paradigm CTO Georgios Konstantopoulos recently released Centaur, an open-source ‘virtual employee’ that operates inside Slack or via API, focusing on self-hosted enterprise security. For newer startups without established Slack presence, Buzz and its competitors may be worth exploring, but Buzz‘s early-stage disclaimer suggests it is not yet mature for production use.