Meta is moving its internal communications from Google Chat to Slack later this month, with chief AI officer Alexandr Wang telling employees the switch is being made because Slack handles AI agents better. Wang laid out the reasoning in a memo sent on Monday, which Business Insider reported on, citing Slack’s conversational interface for agents, its developer tooling and its third-party integrations.The decision reverses a call Meta made less than a year ago. Wang said that when the company first compared the two platforms, they looked similar on features, and leadership went with Google Chat because it worked with Google Workspace. “In retrospect, we made the wrong decision,” Wang wrote, saying AI had evolved considerably since then and that it was increasingly clear how fundamental agents would be to how Meta builds.
Alexandr Wang told staff the second switch in a year will be disruptive and painful
Wang acknowledged in the memo that another migration so soon would be hard on employees, describing it as disruptive and painful. He said the leadership team still believes Slack’s stronger agentic capabilities justify the effort, and that while not everyone at Meta is building agents right now, the whole company stands to gain from a working agent ecosystem.The rollout happens in two phases. Meta Superintelligence Labs, the Agent Transformation Accelerator and DevInfra get early access from September 15. The rest of the company follows on September 29. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. Salesforce also declined, and Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Salesforce picks up a high-profile Slack customer as it pushes AI agents
The move is a win for Salesforce, which bought Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021 and has spent the last two years building agent features into it, including a one-click route to deploy agents built on outside platforms such as LangChain, n8n, Lovable and OpenAI.Salesforce stock has fallen over the past year on doubts about whether AI agents will eventually displace the software people pay for. The shares rose nearly 23 per cent in a single day last week after an expanded partnership with Anthropic and results showing growth in new annual orders.
