Meta is moving its internal communications from Google Chat to Slack, and the reason is AI agents. A memo from AI chief Alexandr Wang, sent to employees the week of Sept. 1, announced the change, Business Insider reported.
“Slack is the strongest platform available today for agents, which is why we’re deciding to make the switch,” the memo says. “Slack has a rich conversational interface for agents, mature developer tooling and strong 3P integrations. While not all of us are building agents today, everyone at the company will benefit from a robust and useful agent ecosystem.”
The “3P integrations” line is the important one. Meta is choosing Slack less for the chat app than for the large catalog of third-party tools and agents that already connect to it. The Next Web summed it up: Meta “did not choose the best chat tool, it chose the largest collection of things that already plug into one.”
A win for Salesforce
The move is a big endorsement for Salesforce, which bought Slack for $27.7 billion in 2021 and has been adding agent features to it. Meta and Salesforce declined to comment, and Google didn’t respond, according to Business Insider.
Salesforce’s stock has been under pressure for the past year on fears that AI agents will replace the software workers use. It jumped nearly 23% in a single day the previous week, after an expanded partnership with Anthropic and strong earnings. “This is not the SaaSpocalypse,” CEO Marc Benioff said. “We’ve been hearing about this for the last two quarters, these dire predictions about the end of software, and how the models eat everything, but none of them have come true for us.”
Meta has switched internal tools before. It ran its own Workplace product internally and sold it to other companies, until it announced in 2024 that it would shut Workplace down.
Integrations vs. control
The Next Web pointed out that many large institutional buyers in Europe are moving the opposite way. France has set a 2027 deadline to replace Teams and Zoom for 2.5 million civil servants with sovereign tools such as Tchap, the government’s Matrix-based messenger. Those suites were picked because the buyer controls the server, not for their agent ecosystems. The EU Data Act also caps cloud switching charges at cost until Jan. 12, 2027, and bans them after that date.
For CIOs, Meta’s reasoning shifts how collaboration platforms get evaluated. If agents will do a growing share of the work in chat, the number and quality of integrations may matter more than the chat client itself.
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