Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together
When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, people kept asking her how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself. But there were a bunch of technical hurdles in the way: moving messages back and forth and getting agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets. Upon digging into the problem, Du realized that there was a deeper issue that stemmed from how communication platforms were designed.
- ▪When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, people kept asking her how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself.
- ▪But there were a bunch of technical hurdles in the way: moving messages back and forth and getting agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets.
- ▪Upon digging into the problem, Du realized that there was a deeper issue that stemmed from how communication platforms were designed.
TechCrunch files mainly under tech. We currently carry 1,026 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/24/ando-eyes-slack-as-it-builds-team-messaging-platform-for-humans-and-agents-to-work-together/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:31:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T14:35:26.090Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T14:35:26.090Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | X6fszSs4-juE · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
When Sara Du was helping companies build MCP servers in 2025, people kept asking her how they could use AI agents from within Slack itself. But there were a bunch of technical hurdles in the way: moving messages back and forth and getting agents the right context, all without burning through token budgets. Upon digging into the problem, Du realized that there was a deeper issue that stemmed from how communication platforms were designed. “The deeper I went, the more I felt Slack and Teams were built for a world that was starting to pass us by,” Du told TechCrunch.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from TechCrunch
