Meta is dropping Google Chat for Slack because it says agents work better there

Meta is migrating internal communications from Google Chat to Slack because Slack is the strongest platform for AI agents, a memo from AI chief Alexandr Wang says. European governments have spent two years moving the other way, onto sovereign suites chosen for control rather than integrations.

Meta is moving its internal communications from Google Chat to Slack. The reason given is AI agents, Business Insider reported.

“Slack is the strongest platform available today for agents,” a memo from AI chief Alexandr Wang says. It cites the conversational interface, developer tooling and third-party integrations.

Read that last part again. Meta did not choose the best chat tool, it chose the largest collection of things that already plug into one.

It is a substantial win for Salesforce, which bought Slack for $27.7B in 2021. Meta and Salesforce declined to comment, and Google did not respond.

Europe’s largest institutional buyers have spent two years going the other way. France ordered its ministries off Windows and set a 2027 deadline to replace Teams and Zoom for 2.5 million civil servants.

The replacement is not an ecosystem play. Tchap, the French state’s Matrix-based messenger, has more than 600,000 users and runs on certified sovereign infrastructure. The state runs its own video tool and webmail on the same stack.

Germany has gone further in places. Schleswig-Holstein moved 44,000 mailboxes and 110 million emails off proprietary software last year, saving €15M in licences.

The International Criminal Court runs a version of the same stack. It uses openDesk, the sovereign suite built by Germany’s ZenDiS, with Element providing the chat. The Bundeswehr and Swiss Post run Matrix as well.

The pipeline is longer than that. Matrix is in conversation with around 35 governments about open source communications, The Register reported.

None of those were chosen for their agent ecosystems. They were chosen because the buyer controls the server, which is a different question entirely.

The switch itself is now regulated in Europe. Under the EU Data Act a provider may require at most two months’ notice and must complete the transfer within 30 days.

The price of leaving falls to zero next year. Switching charges are capped at cost until 12 January 2027 and prohibited from that date. The rules cover software as a service, not only infrastructure.

Which leaves the awkward part unanswered. TNW has argued Europe’s cloud dependency is a political risk, and the sovereign stack it is buying instead has no agent ecosystem in it.