What Happens When AI Joins Your Slack?

For two years the deal with AI was "open a new tab," but this week it stopped waiting in a separate window and walked into the rooms where you already work.

The Big Story

On June 23, Anthropic launched Claude Tag, an AI agent that lives inside Slack. You summon it the way you would a coworker: type @Claude in a channel, hand it a task, and it breaks the job into steps, works through them on its own, and posts the result back in the thread. The twist is that it is multiplayer. When Claude Tag is working in a channel, everyone can see it, jump in, and steer it, so a half-finished task can be handed off between teammates instead of living in one person's private chat. Admins get audit logs, access controls, and spend caps, and Anthropic says about 65% of its own product team's code now runs through an internal version of the tool.

Here is why this is bigger than one company's launch: it is happening everywhere at once. The same week, Microsoft made Copilot Cowork generally available, and Google pushed Gemini deeper into Sheets, Drive, and Gmail (both in Quick Picks below). The pattern is the actual story. The tab-switching era of AI, where you copy your context into a chatbot and paste the answer back, is ending. The winners will not be the smartest models in a vacuum, they will be the ones that show up inside Slack, your inbox, and your documents, the places you already lose hours. One honest caveat before you get excited: Claude Tag is in beta for Claude Team and Enterprise customers only, so solo operators and small teams on free Slack cannot touch it yet. And the optional "ambient" mode, which lets it read a channel and chime in unprompted, is genuinely useful and genuinely worth a team conversation before you switch it on. (Sources: Fortune, TechRepublic.)

Tool of the Week: Circleback

What it does: Circleback is an AI notetaker that joins your video calls, writes the notes and action items for you, and now also captures whatever gets shared on screen.

Why it matters this week: On May 28 it shipped screen-sharing capture. This closes the most annoying gap in AI notetakers: they only ever heard the conversation, so the number on the slide, the dashboard everyone reacted to, the timeline buried in a shared doc all vanished from the recap. Circleback now reads what is shared on screen and folds those details into your searchable notes, not just the talk track.

How to use it:

1. Sign up at circleback.ai and connect your Google or Microsoft calendar. It is one click, with nothing to install for the web version.
2. Leave auto-join on so Circleback shows up to your scheduled Zoom, Meet, or Teams calls. You just attend the meeting as normal.
3. After the call, open the note for the summary, the auto-assigned action items, and now the on-screen details. Search across every past meeting, or push the action items into your other tools.

Pricing: Free to try. Paid plans start at $20.83/user/month for Individual (billed annually) with unlimited meetings, Team is $25/user/month, and Enterprise is custom.
Link: circleback.ai

Quick Picks

• Microsoft Copilot Cowork: Microsoft's agentic assistant that runs long, multi-step jobs and hands back finished work instead of a draft went generally available June 16. It needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot license at $30/user/month. → Read more
• Google Workspace June drop: Gemini in Sheets now fixes broken formulas with a one-click button, Drive suggests folders for your loose files, and Gmail can refine a draft from a prompt bar. Included in Workspace plans from $14/user/month. → Read more
• Getty Images in ChatGPT: Getty signed a multiyear deal on June 21 to surface its licensed photo library inside ChatGPT results, useful if you source visuals for decks or posts. It is free inside ChatGPT. → Read more
• OpenAI previews GPT-5.6: A new three-tier family (Sol, Terra, and Luna) with a "max" reasoning mode arrived June 26, limited to about 20 partner organizations for now, with a wider release promised in the coming weeks. → Read more

Pro Tip