Three AI Teammates Shipped in 30 Days. Only One Can Log Into Your Tools.

In 30 days, three companies shipped the same idea: AI agents that sit in your team’s chat and work alongside the humans.

Buzz arrived from Jack Dorsey’s Block on July 21. Grok Bot followed on August 11 from SpaceXAI, the company that was xAI until SpaceX bought it in February. Add to Slack landed on August 20.

The pitches are close enough to sound interchangeable. The products are not, and the difference that matters to a marketing team is a plain one: only one of them can sign into a tool and do the work. The other two are places for an agent to live.

Here’s what each one does, what it costs, and what it’s worth if your marketing team is four people.

	Grok Bot	Add to Slack	Buzz
Maker	SpaceXAI	Slack	Block
Shipped	Aug 11	Aug 20	Jul 21
In one line	A worker	A room	A room you own
Reaches a tool with no API	Yes	Agent-dependent	Agent-dependent
Agent comes from	SpaceXAI	10 partners	You
Choose your model	No	Agent-dependent	Yes
Self-hostable	No	No	Yes
Team entry price	$40/user/mo	Slack seats + agent	Free + your hosting
Overage rate published	No	Not priced	You assemble it
Maturity, their words	Beta	Varies by partner	”Early stages”

Every cell above is from the companies’ own announcements and pricing pages, and the two blank-looking ones are the finding rather than a gap in the reporting: nobody publishes what happens after the allowance runs out.

Grok Bot: the one that clicks things

The capability claim is the whole product. Grok Bot’s agents, in the company’s words, “sign in to your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work.”

That includes software with no API and no MCP connector, the plumbing that normally has to exist before any automation can touch a tool. Each agent runs on its own cloud machine, keeps working after you close your laptop, learns routines by watching you do them once, and remembers preferences between jobs. Paid media is on the company’s own list of use cases, alongside CRM updates, account health and vendor negotiations.

Two operators who tested it early are quoted approvingly. Lenny Rachitsky said he hadn’t “been this excited about a new AI product in a while.” Matt Shumer, running three agents together, said “It worked out of the box.”

Cost. This is where it moved this week. At launch on August 11, the cheapest team route was Cursor Teams Premium at $120 per seat per month. On August 21 SpaceXAI extended access to “all SuperGrok Plus, Cursor Pro+, and Cursor Teams plans.” Cursor Teams starts at $40 per user per month, so the entry price for a team fell by two thirds in ten days. On the individual side, SpaceXAI’s pricing page puts Grok Bot access at the SuperGrok Plus tier, $100 a month.

If you’re a marketing team of one to five. This is the only one of the three that changes what you can do rather than where you do it. Every small team keeps a list of jobs it never automated, and the reason is almost never difficulty. The tool had no API and nobody had an engineer to spare. That list is the thing to test against.

The caution is the same one we found in the AI spending ceiling. An agent that runs while you sleep is an agent that spends while you sleep, and neither the pricing page nor the launch post says what happens once you pass the included usage. Ask before you scale it, not after.

Slack: the one your team is already in

Add to Slack is a one-click way to drop a custom agent into a workspace, and Slack names marketing, HR and sales as intended users rather than engineers. Ten platforms launched with it, including the ones non-engineers build in: n8n, LangChain, Lovable, Superhuman, OpenAI, Vercel and Runlayer.

It ships nothing that does marketing work by itself. You bring the agent; Slack gives it a room, your existing permissions, and a browser where every agent in the workspace is listed.

Andy Berma, co-founder and CEO of launch partner Runlayer, put the positioning in four words: “Slack is where that starts.” Brace Sproul, who runs applied AI at LangChain, framed the benefit as agents working “right in the flow of work.” Slack’s own chief marketing officer Ryan Gavin was blunter about the land grab: “All these agents need a home and a place to work with the teammates, and that’s Slack.”

Cost. No separate price was announced. You pay for the Slack seats you already have, plus whatever the agent costs. That second number is the one that varies.

If you’re a marketing team of one to five. The value here isn’t approval, whatever the launch copy says about IT. Most small teams have no security review to satisfy. The value is that the agent stops living on one person’s laptop. It runs in a channel, where a colleague can see what it did and say when it’s wrong. The real small-team risk was never compliance. It’s that one person understands the automation and then goes on holiday. We covered the unsupervised version of that in the agents nobody could see.

Buzz: the one you own

Buzz is Block’s open-source chat platform, free, self-hostable, and model-agnostic. Dorsey describes it as “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open source.” Agents are members of channels alongside people, and Git projects live in the same window as the conversation.

The argument is bargaining power rather than capability. If you choose the model, nobody can reprice you later or retire the one you built on. Block also concedes the product is early, and the desktop app is where it stands today.

Cost. The software is free. The bill is hosting, model tokens, and the engineering hours to run it.

If you’re a marketing team of one to five. Be honest about this one: you are not going to self-host a chat platform. Buzz matters to you as a price ceiling rather than a purchase. Its existence is the reason your other vendors have to keep explaining what you get for the seat, and it’s worth knowing about for that reason alone.

The number nobody published

Every comparison of these three has repeated the sticker prices. None answers the question a finance-conscious buyer asks second: what happens when you go over.

Grok Bot’s plans include a usage allowance, and neither SpaceXAI’s launch post nor its pricing page states the overage rate. Slack didn’t price Add to Slack at all. Buzz’s cost is a metered model bill you assemble yourself. So all three publish a number that is the floor, and none publishes the number that decides whether this is affordable at volume.

Call it the state of the category one week in rather than an accusation. It does mean a pilot should have a spend alert on it before it has a second user.

The case for doing nothing yet

There’s a real argument for waiting, and timidity isn’t it.

Grok Bot is in beta, and it reaches your tools by signing in as you, which means every access decision you have ever made is now also an agent permission. Buzz says plainly that it’s early. Slack’s is a distribution move with ten partners whose products vary enormously in maturity. Nobody here has a year of production evidence. The category is moving fast enough that one entry price fell by two thirds while we were reporting it.

The counter is narrower than “adopt now.” A pilot on one annoying task costs a month of one seat. Waiting six months costs you the learning, and the learning is the part that doesn’t arrive faster later.

What to do about it

1. Write the list. Every job your team skips automating because the tool has no API. That list is the only real test of whether Grok Bot’s claim holds for your stack.
2. Pick the most annoying item, not the biggest. A boring recurring task with a clear finish line tells you more in a week than an ambitious one tells you in a quarter.
3. Put a spend alert on it before a second person touches it. None of the three publishes an overage rate.
4. Don’t move your team’s chat. The switching cost is enormous and none of these has earned it. Bring the agent to where your team already talks.

Three companies had the same idea this month. Two of them built rooms and one built a worker, and the pricing moved as if everyone already knows which is worth more.