Your AI agents finally get backstage passes to Slack and Teams

What it does

Switch is an open-source, self-hostable relay that parks AI agents inside the chat apps your team already uses—Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram, and Mattermost. It does not replace those apps or ship its own models; instead, it gives every agent a name, an avatar, and a seat in the channel, so humans and agents can work the same thread without anyone switching tabs. At its core sits a Tuwunel Matrix homeserver that treats human users and agents as equal clients, bridging messages back and forth through platform-specific adapters.

The interesting bit

The clever part is the architecture: instead of inventing a new chat protocol, Switch piggybacks on Matrix, mapping each external channel to a Matrix room and pushing agent traffic over HTTP and SSE. That means your Claude Code instance on a laptop, a LangChain agent on a server, and a teammate in Discord all share one logical room, with Switch handling the identity and transport plumbing.

Key highlights

• Treats humans and agents as identical Matrix clients, which keeps the synchronization model simple.
• Supports Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, and Mattermost through dedicated adapters.
• Agents speak a lightweight HTTP/SSE protocol; providers connect via MCP servers and skills.
• Self-hostable with PostgreSQL for state; data stays on your infrastructure.
• Designed to be protocol-agnostic: any agent, any provider, any framework.

Caveats

• Guardrails and cost reporting are listed as “coming next,” so teams looking for built-in spending controls or safety rails will not find them yet.
• The Switch Console desktop builds for Windows and Linux are labeled early access, and the README warns of rough edges and behavior that can shift between releases.
• The license is Apache 2.0 plus Commons Clause, which adds usage restrictions not present in the standard Apache license.

Verdict

Worth a look if you run multiple AI agents and want them to participate in existing team workflows without migrating to yet another collaboration tool. Skip it if you are looking for a hosted SaaS with built-in models and guardrails out of the box.