https://www.fivetran.com/blog/anthropic-please-make-a-new-slack Fivetran blue logoFivetran white logo Product [67d2454542] Fivetran platform overview A single platform for all your data movement needs Learn more Platform Capabilities [67e57996ad] Transformations Accelerate insights with automated transformations [67e57996aa] Security Rigorous, built-in security to move data with peace of mind [67e57996fb] Governance Know, protect and scale your data with governed data movement [67e57996c9] Extensibility Easily integrate Fivetran with other tools and systems to optimize workflows at scale [697d0d64ee] Activations Move warehouse data to business tools to drive impact Deployment [67e579964a] Hybrid Deployment Securely move all of your data without compromising performance Sources + Destinations SaaS replication Database replication SAP replication Streaming replication File replication Custom connectors Destination to destination Data lakes New Data warehouses Solutions For operational use cases [67f0156449] Data democratization Make data accessible without compromising on compliance [67f0156450] Infrastructure modernization Accelerate your business through cloud adoption [67f0156469] Embedded Effortlessly connect to your customers' data [67f0156438] Data readiness for AI Power your AI innovation with reliable access to centralized and governed data [689373e414] Analytics Drive smarter business decisions with real-time analytics Industries Retail & CPG Financial services Healthcare Manufacturing For developers Data developers Benchmarking REST API Partners Program overview Partner directory Amazon Web Services Databricks Google BigQuery Microsoft Azure Snowflake Connectors Pricing Overview Free plan No credit card required All features Total cost of ownership Resources Blog Customer stories Resource center Documentation Onboarding News Events Professional services Podcast Featured resource Interactive demo See Fivetran in action View interactive demo Trust Support portal Status Book demo nowLog inStart free Anthropic, please make a new Slack Slack will be the Waterloo of closed data. George Fraser George Fraser March 6, 2026 [69ab2715c3] 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 The conventional wisdom is that Slack is unassailable because of network effects. This is wrong. Slack's network effects are actually quite weak. The "network effect" of Slack is that you have some Slack Connect channels with a few close partners. This is valuable, but you can live without it. Claude-in-Slack would be a big enough benefit to balance out this cost. Slack is also severely overpriced. If you're a company of any meaningful size, you will need to support legal holds in Slack, which means you need Enterprise+. Fivetran pays almost as much for Slack as we pay for G Suite, which we use for everything. This does not make sense! NewSlack and Claude are a perfect bundle It would be a no-brainer to buy a seat for NewSlack + Claude for every employee. Every company has a long tail of casual AI users who don't use AI enough to justify the per-seat price, but with NewSlack in the bundle, it would make sense to pay for a standard seat for every employee. Bundling would solve another problem: every company has a faction of AI skeptics who aren't using AI. NewSlack will be the ideal environment to win over these skeptics; their human coworkers will demonstrate how to use Claude in the group chat. The commitment that would make it work NewSlack needs to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past; it needs a credible commitment to open data access and interoperability with other similar systems, including competitors. Anthropic is uniquely positioned to do this because they have a demonstrated track record of standing by their principles under extraordinary pressure. Anthropic could make a public commitment to permit open data access and to interoperate with similar systems, and they would be believed. Anthropic building a successful Slack competitor would fix the entire enterprise-data ecosystem. Slack would be Waterloo for closed data. The alternative -- a world where the most important corpus of business communication is permanently locked behind a closed API -- is bad for everyone. So, Anthropic: please make a new Slack. The world needs it. [CTA_MODULE] Data insights Data insights Anthropic, please make a new Slack Anthropic, please make a new Slack March 6, 2026 March 6, 2026 Anthropic, please make a new Slack [63a0c39b92] George Fraser CEO , Fivetran Anchor Link [63a0c39b92] George Fraser CEO , Fivetran Topics AI Share Slack will be the Waterloo of closed data. 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 The conventional wisdom is that Slack is unassailable because of network effects. This is wrong. Slack's network effects are actually quite weak. The "network effect" of Slack is that you have some Slack Connect channels with a few close partners. This is valuable, but you can live without it. Claude-in-Slack would be a big enough benefit to balance out this cost. Slack is also severely overpriced. If you're a company of any meaningful size, you will need to support legal holds in Slack, which means you need Enterprise+. Fivetran pays almost as much for Slack as we pay for G Suite, which we use for everything. This does not make sense! NewSlack and Claude are a perfect bundle It would be a no-brainer to buy a seat for NewSlack + Claude for every employee. Every company has a long tail of casual AI users who don't use AI enough to justify the per-seat price, but with NewSlack in the bundle, it would make sense to pay for a standard seat for every employee. Bundling would solve another problem: every company has a faction of AI skeptics who aren't using AI. NewSlack will be the ideal environment to win over these skeptics; their human coworkers will demonstrate how to use Claude in the group chat. The commitment that would make it work NewSlack needs to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past; it needs a credible commitment to open data access and interoperability with other similar systems, including competitors. Anthropic is uniquely positioned to do this because they have a demonstrated track record of standing by their principles under extraordinary pressure. Anthropic could make a public commitment to permit open data access and to interoperate with similar systems, and they would be believed. Anthropic building a successful Slack competitor would fix the entire enterprise-data ecosystem. Slack would be Waterloo for closed data. The alternative -- a world where the most important corpus of business communication is permanently locked behind a closed API -- is bad for everyone. So, Anthropic: please make a new Slack. The world needs it. [CTA_MODULE] Read more insights straight from Fivetran's CEO. Start here Topics AI Share Related blog posts [] Heading Start for free Join the thousands of companies using Fivetran to centralize and transform their data. Email[ ] [Sign up] Thank you! Your submission has been received! Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form. 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