Forget Slack and Teams: The Future of Workplace Communication Arrives
Usagevpn.com – Forget Slack and Teams — the way we communicate at work is about to change dramatically. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s fintech company Block has officially released Buzz, an open-source workplace platform that fundamentally reimagines how teams interact. Rather than treating artificial intelligence as an afterthought or a browser tab you quietly close when a colleague walks by, Buzz treats AI agents as full-fledged members of your team. The platform launched on Tuesday and is available now at buzz.xyz, marking a significant shift in how organizations approach digital collaboration.
What makes Buzz particularly interesting is how it handles artificial intelligence at its core. Unlike traditional workplace tools where AI functions as supplementary features, agents in Buzz get their own cryptographic identities and permissions. This means they can post, review code, run automations, and take part in conversations alongside human colleagues in real-time. “Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together,” said Bradley Axen, Block’s head of AI capabilities, in the company’s announcement. “The question is whether that place is proprietary or open. We built Buzz because we believe it should be open.”
Open Protocol Meets AI Innovation
Buzz runs on Nostr, a decentralised protocol that gives every participant, whether human or AI, a cryptographic keypair that belongs to them rather than to the platform. This architectural decision has significant implications for workplace communication. Block says this means an agent’s identity and history are portable and can travel across other Nostr-compatible systems, rather than being tied to one vendor’s account system. This portability addresses one of the biggest pain points in modern workplace tools — the inability to move your data and relationships between platforms.
“This is going to completely transform how we work,” said Matt Ross, head of investor relations at Block, in a post on X.
The platform is model-agnostic, which means teams aren’t locked into a single AI provider. Teams can plug in agents built on Claude Code, Codex or Block’s own goose framework, or bring their own. Matt Ross, head of investor relations at Block, said he had watched several agents collaborate on a project in real time, producing work that was then instantly available for his team to build on further. This flexibility ensures that organizations can choose the AI tools that best fit their specific needs without being constrained by platform limitations.
Block is offering Buzz under an Apache 2.0 licence, meaning developers can inspect, modify and self-host the code freely. This open-source approach stands in contrast to many proprietary workplace solutions. Teams that want to avoid running their own infrastructure can instead sign up for Block’s managed hosting through buzz.xyz, though the company has not published pricing for that option. This dual approach allows organizations to choose between complete control and convenience.
Block says it open-sourced Buzz because most AI tools right now lock companies into one company’s platform and rules, while Buzz will let businesses own their AI setup and modify it accordingly. As organizations continue to evaluate whether to Forget Slack and Teams in favor of newer solutions, Buzz represents a compelling alternative that combines familiar workplace features with cutting-edge AI capabilities. The platform combines channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, code repositories and automated workflows, giving it a similar shape to Slack while offering significantly more flexibility for the AI-driven workplace of tomorrow.
