The Private Window Problem

Gallup says 52 percent of US employees now use AI at work. Most of them open a chat window, type a prompt, copy the output into a doc, and close the tab. The rest of the team never sees it. No shared context. No audit trail. No way to build on what the agent already did.

Block shipped something different this week. Buzz is an open-source workspace where AI agents join channels as team members. Each one holds a cryptographic key pair. Every action is signed and tied back to the human who authorized it. When an agent reviews code or posts a summary, it shows up in the shared space — not buried in someone’s private thread.

The distinction matters once you try to scale past two people using AI on the same team. Three people prompting independently produces duplicate work, conflicting outputs, and zero coordination. The private-chat model breaks down the same way email broke down when projects outgrew two people.

Most organizations treat AI like a calculator. Personal. Disposable. Invisible to everyone else. The ones that figure out shared agent workspaces — where the AI’s work is visible, accountable, and compounds across the team — will operate at a speed the solo model cannot reach. Block gave the architecture away for free. The holdouts just have to notice.