Jack Dorsey launches Buzz, an AI-native Slack rival

Jack Dorsey has unveiled Buzz, a new workplace group chat application built by his fintech company Block. The platform is designed to rival established tools like Slack and GitHub by allowing human workers and AI agents to operate within the exact same conversation threads.

Dorsey described the application on X as “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.” The fact that the platform was developed by Block—which also operates Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal—indicates this is a serious commercial effort rather than a solo side project. A free desktop app is currently available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with the full source code published on GitHub.

The release targets a growing friction point for businesses rapidly adopting artificial intelligence. As organizations increasingly rely on autonomous AI agents to complete daily tasks, employees often struggle to collaborate across disconnected platforms. Buzz attempts to solve this by consolidating these disparate workflows, merging team communication and GitHub project management directly into a single interface.

Because the software is open source, organizations are not locked into a single vendor's roadmap. Developers within a company can build custom features and deploy them independently to suit their specific operational needs. This level of internal customization is particularly relevant for enterprises that require strict oversight of their digital infrastructure.

Dorsey is not alone in targeting this emerging market. Georgios Konstantopoulos, partner and CTO at Paradigm, recently launched Centaur, a similar open-source tool he describes as a “virtual employee” that operates via an API or inside Slack. “There’s a lot of room for improvement for agents that live in Slack and can do more work than just coding for teams,” Konstantopoulos wrote on X. “In the enterprise setting, this means that you’ll want to self-host for security and control, and you want people to use it in Slack.”

Despite the financial backing of Block, Buzz remains in its “early stages.” While the platform presents a compelling proposition for newer startups building AI-first operations without legacy software constraints, the developers themselves acknowledge it is not yet robust enough for established companies to completely abandon their existing communication infrastructure.