Some in the tech community say OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s next challenge should be building a Slack-like collaboration tool.

Shawn Wang (션 왕), an entrepreneur and startup advisor, also wrote in a recent post on X, formerly Twitter, that OpenAI building a Slack-like service itself would be a bet worth making.

He argued that developing a collaboration tool would be difficult for other companies to attempt, would draw a positive reaction from the tech community and would help expand ChatGPT Enterprise and its coding offerings.

He said Slack has many problems from a developer’s perspective. He said, "Slack abandoned the developer community in 2019 and shifted toward the enterprise market, and Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021 for $27.7 billion. Since then, Slack has continually raised prices and has stood still when it comes to introducing AI features. Slack AI is sometimes useful, but it is hard to discover or learn, and it cannot be personalized. Outages are frequent."

He added, "User satisfaction is low, but every organization in the tech industry uses Slack. There is room to improve everything. Developers complain about Slack API costs and permission settings. Founders complain about pricing. Users suffer from channel overload and feel the summary tools and notification spam are terrible."

OpenAI introduced a group chat feature in ChatGPT 3 months ago. But usage outside OpenAI is still not high. Even so, Wang thinks OpenAI and a collaboration tool remain a good match.

Anthropic has pursued a much more consistent strategy than OpenAI. It integrated chat, collaboration and Claude Code into a single app and also offers an option in Chrome to control the browser through Claude.

OpenAI, by contrast, has its features spread out. He said, "OpenAI has a chat app, a browser app and a coding app, all separate. You have to log in again every time. Even if they integrate later, they will still be behind. They should not slowly follow what Anthropic has already done," and added, "An OpenAI version of Slack is a chance to regain the initiative. It can also be used as a coding agent interface." He added, "A major piece still missing from the Codex app is a proper multiplayer capability. You can see humans and agents working together through the perfect orchestration interface called chat."

Slack’s built-in voice and video calling feature, Huddles, could offer better real-time multimodal AI features, and Slack Connect, which lets users collaborate with outside organizations, was cited as an example OpenAI could benchmark.

He said, "Now is the time to overlay customer organizations’ social graphs and work graphs on top of ChatGPT, and to apply agents and AI across every interface in the way OpenAI does best. Network effects make it 10,000 times harder to leave for a competitor. Of course, you can build on top of Slack as it is now, but then switching is easy and you will not get the opportunity to reinvent as freely."