Jack Dorsey launches Buzz, a group chat app that puts AI agents in the same room as your team

Key points

• Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, launched Buzz on 21 July 2026.
• Buzz is a free, open-source group chat platform that combines team messaging, AI agents, and GitHub project management in one window.
• Jack Dorsey announced the app on X, calling it "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source".
• Buzz currently describes itself as being in its "early stages".
• Free desktop apps are available now for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and payments company Block, launched a new workplace chat app on Tuesday called Buzz. The goal is straightforward: replace Slack (the popular office messaging tool) and GitHub (the platform developers use to store and manage code) with a single workspace where people and AI agents can all talk in the same place.

An AI agent, to be clear, is software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own, like drafting documents, filing tickets, or running code, without a human clicking through every step. As more companies hand routine work to these agents, keeping track of what the humans and the bots are each doing has become genuinely messy. Buzz tries to solve that by putting everyone in the same chat window.

Block, which also runs Square, Cash App, Afterpay, and Tidal, built the product. This is not a side project.

Because Buzz is open source, meaning its underlying code is freely available for anyone to inspect and modify, teams can tailor it to their own workflows. Need a feature Buzz does not offer? Build it yourself and roll it out to your own instance. That flexibility is a meaningful difference from Slack, which is a closed, subscription-based product.

Dorsey is not alone in spotting this gap. Georgios Konstantopoulos, a partner and chief technology officer at crypto investment firm Paradigm, unveiled a similar open-source product in May 2026 called Centaur. He describes it as a "virtual employee" that works either inside Slack or through an API, a technical connection that lets two software systems talk to each other. Konstantopoulos argued on X that there is "a lot of room for improvement for agents that live in Slack and can do more work than just coding for teams."

Should teams switch to Buzz right now?

Probably not yet. Buzz itself admits the platform is in its "early stages", which typically means rough edges, missing features, and the real possibility that things break. Porting an entire team's communication history and workflows to a brand-new tool carries real risk.

For newer startups that already rely on AI agents and have not yet committed to Slack, Buzz is worth a look. Everyone else should monitor progress before making any move.

The free Buzz desktop app is available today for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The source code is published on GitHub. First reported by TechCrunch AI, no pricing for any paid tier has been announced.