Slack will be the Waterloo of closed data.
For companies like Fivetran that are heavy users of Slack, it replaces email and even conversation as the primary place and mode of collaboration. Questions are asked and answered, arguments are had, decisions are made, all in Slack. Our Slack message history represents nothing less than the accumulated tribal knowledge of the company. And right now, that tribal knowledge is locked inside a product with the worst data access policies in enterprise software.
We need a new Slack, and Anthropic is the right company to build it.
Claude's missing feature is group conversation
Claude has a glaring limitation: it only does 1:1 conversations. In business, work happens in groups. Today, if I want Claude's help with something that came up in a Slack thread, I have to relay the context between Slack and Claude by copy-pasting. This is absurd. I am not a sub-agent!
We need Claude and Claude Code, with their skills and plugins, with their context, to be first-class participants in our company's Slack. But this problem can't be solved by a Slack integration because of another problem: data access.
Slack's data policies are unacceptable
The most important repository of text data in many businesses lives in their Slack instances. It's the unfiltered, real-time stream of how your company actually operates. The Slack text corpus is tribal knowledge reified.
Slack's data access policy is basically "No." Slack is simultaneously the most important source of context for AI agents in business and the most restricted API in enterprise software. This is unacceptable, and there is only one thing that will change the present state of affairs: competition.
Vendors don't provide open APIs out of the goodness of their hearts; they do it because their customers demand it, and the alternative to providing open data access is to lose those customers to competitors who do. Nothing will persuade enterprise softwares of the wisdom of an open data strategy like a vivid demonstration of this principle.
Slack is more vulnerable than you think
The conventional wisdom is that Slack is unassailable because of network effects. This is wrong. Slack's network effects are actually quite weak. The "network effect" of Slack is that you have some Slack Connect channels with a few close partners. This is valuable, but you can live without it. Claude-in-Slack would be a big enough benefit to balance out this cost.
Slack is also severely overpriced. If you're a company of any meaningful size, you will need to support legal holds in Slack, which means you need Enterprise+. Fivetran pays almost as much for Slack as we pay for G Suite, which we use for everything. This does not make sense!
NewSlack and Claude are a perfect bundle
It would be a no-brainer to buy a seat for NewSlack + Claude for every employee. Every company has a long tail of casual AI users who don't use AI enough to justify the per-seat price, but with NewSlack in the bundle, it would make sense to pay for a standard seat for every employee.
Bundling would solve another problem: every company has a faction of AI skeptics who aren't using AI. NewSlack will be the ideal environment to win over these skeptics; their human coworkers will demonstrate how to use Claude in the group chat.
The commitment that would make it work
NewSlack needs to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past; it needs a credible commitment to open data access and interoperability with other similar systems, including competitors. Anthropic is uniquely positioned to do this because they have a demonstrated track record of standing by their principles under extraordinary pressure. Anthropic could make a public commitment to permit open data access and to interoperate with similar systems, and they would be believed.
Anthropic building a successful Slack competitor would fix the entire enterprise-data ecosystem. Slack would be Waterloo for closed data. The alternative — a world where the most important corpus of business communication is permanently locked behind a closed API — is bad for everyone.
So, Anthropic: please make a new Slack. The world needs it.
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