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
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