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Claude hunts for misalignment in Slack
The weekly check
Using Cowork's Slack connection, the instruction is to look across Slack, given the projects on top of mind, and find areas of potential misalignment. It runs every week and reports back on what to be aware of. It does a really good job.
What it caught
The leader of Anthropic's enterprise team used it and found major misalignments that would have sent teams spinning their wheels or doing overlapping work. Shipping at bigger companies is often held back by cross-functional coordination, and this reduces some of that toil. Six months ago it wasn't possible.
What it takes
The same setup can flag, before a launch, who needs to be talked to and what to keep in mind. It takes the Cowork desktop app and a connected Slack integration, and in a large organization an admin may need to enable it.
Why does coordination slow big companies?
As an organization grows, the number of possible communication paths between people grows roughly with the square of headcount, and no one can follow all of them. Frederick Brooks made this point about software teams in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. Teams in separate parts of a company can therefore pursue overlapping goals without either noticing. Melvin Conway observed in 1967 that organizations end up building systems that mirror their own communication structures.
How does Claude connect to Slack?
Anthropic introduced the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, in November 2024 as an open standard for connecting AI applications to outside tools and data. A Slack server built on the protocol exposes actions such as searching messages and reading channels. Claude calls those actions on request, and what it can see is limited to what the connected account is allowed to see. OpenAI and Google later adopted the protocol as well.
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