What is Buzz? Jack Dorsey's new AI-agent workplace chat app taking on Slack

Jack Dorsey has spent his career reinventing communication platforms — first Twitter, then the payments company Block. Now his sights are set on Slack, the undisputed leader of corporate messaging for over a decade. His new venture is called Buzz.

What sets Buzz apart from other workplace chat apps is a simple but radical idea: bringing AI agents into the same conversation flow as human employees. In the traditional model, an AI bot typically operates in a separate interface or a limited command line, whereas in Buzz these agents can join channels, respond to messages, and take on tasks just like a human participant.

That approach reflects a broader industry trend in which AI agents are no longer merely background tools, but active participants directly embedded in teams' daily workflows. Companies are increasingly turning to agent-based systems to hand off tasks such as prioritizing customer support requests, summarizing meeting notes, or tracking project status.

Slack has been considered the standard tool for corporate communication for more than a decade, and as part of Salesforce it commands a vast enterprise customer base. That makes Dorsey's venture especially bold: for Buzz to succeed, it needs not just a new feature set, but to convince companies to shift entrenched habits and abandon existing integration investments.

Dorsey's past ventures suggest he tends to operate from a philosophy emphasizing decentralization and user control. Similar themes stood out in Bluesky, which he founded after leaving Twitter, and in the payments-focused Block. Whether Buzz carries that same philosophy into workplace communication will become clearer as the product matures.

Early previews of the app show an interface where teams can see human and AI contributions in a single timeline, aiming to make it easier to track whether a given decision was made by a human or an agent. That transparency is seen as a response to growing concerns about accountability in enterprise AI use.

Analysts note that the biggest challenge Buzz will face is not technology, but adoption. In the enterprise software market, users' familiarity with existing tools and the cost of integration can pose a far stronger barrier than technical superiority. Slack itself initially faced a similar struggle competing against entrenched email habits.

Security and data privacy also rank high on the agenda of enterprise decision-makers. Integrating AI agents into a chat environment with access to sensitive business data raises new questions about what information agents can process and retain — an area Buzz will need to clarify to win over enterprise customers.

Market observers stress that the venture's success will be measured not by Dorsey's name alone, but by how much genuine benefit the product delivers in real-world use cases. While having AI agents present in a conversation may look innovative, whether that feature actually makes teams work more efficiently has yet to be proven.

For now, Buzz stands as a new challenge to the corporate messaging market — and, in a space once dominated by a single giant, it raises a broader question about just how deeply AI agents can become embedded in human workflows.