Slack for Agents — Building the Internet of Agents

Why It Matters

Band’s agent‑centric messaging platform gives enterprises a scalable, language‑agnostic way to orchestrate diverse AI agents, turning the emerging agentic economy into a practical, revenue‑generating reality.

Key Takeaways

• Band provides a Slack‑like messaging layer for AI agents.
• Agents can discover, collaborate, and hold multi‑peer conversations in real time.
• Platform uses natural‑language communication to bridge heterogeneous agent ecosystems.
• Enterprise licensing is tiered by number of agents and high‑volume sessions.
• Built on WhatsApp/Discord tech stack to handle massive agent traffic.

Summary

In this TechStrong.TV interview, Eric Gumenovsky, CEO of Band, outlines the company’s vision of an "Internet of Agents" – a Slack‑style collaboration platform that lets autonomous AI agents communicate, discover each other, and solve business problems together. Band’s core product is an agent interaction layer that supports full‑duplex, multi‑peer conversations, enabling agents to negotiate, price, and make decisions much like humans do in real time.

Gumenovsky explains that the next wave of the agentic economy hinges on two prerequisites: mature reasoning powered by large language models and a common communication fabric. By using natural language as the lingua franca, Band eliminates the need for bespoke schemas and lets humans supervise and intervene in agent dialogues. The platform also tackles the engineering challenges of non‑deterministic, distributed micro‑services, drawing on the same high‑throughput messaging stack that powers WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram.

He likens Band to "the Slack for agents," contrasting it with earlier social‑network‑style experiments such as Malbook, which he calls the "Facebook for agents." He predicts agent traffic will soon eclipse human messaging volumes, noting that agents can generate full documents instantly, far outpacing human typing speed. The discussion also touches on the business model: a freemium tier for basic connectivity and an enterprise license priced by the number of agents (and, in high‑volume B2C cases, by session count).

If adopted widely, Band could become the de‑facto collaboration infrastructure for enterprises deploying heterogeneous AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and SaaS vendors. By unifying these agents under a single, observable, policy‑driven mesh, companies can accelerate automation, reduce integration friction, and unlock new revenue streams from agent‑driven services.

Original Description

Today's agents work in silos — built in different frameworks, hosted on different clouds, locked inside different SaaS platforms. Arick Goomanovsky, CEO and Co-Founder of BAND, joins Alan Shimel on TechStrong TV to explain why that won't work in the agentic economy, and what his team is building to fix it. Arick walks through his journey from co-founding Sygnia and Ermetic (acquired by Tenable in 2023) to leaving Tenable a year ago to chase a thesis he's held since 2018 — that agents will one day make real economic decisions, and they'll need an infrastructure to collaborate with each other and with humans. BAND, which exited stealth with $17M in seed funding from Sierra Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and Team8, is building that layer: a real-time, multi-peer interaction infrastructure that works across LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Code, Codex, and SaaS agents from Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, and more. He and Alan dig into why agents must speak natural language, how the BAND control plane gives enterprises governance and visibility, and the pricing model behind it.

In this conversation, Arick and Alan cover:

• Why Arick has been waiting since 2018 to build an agent collaboration layer

• The difference between agent orchestration assembly lines and real multi-agent collaboration

• Why agents must speak natural language — for humans, supervision, and LLM economics

• Connecting agents across LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Code, Codex, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more

• The control plane: AIOps visibility, policies, authority boundaries, and governance

• BAND's freemium platform and the agent-count + session pricing model

Chapters:

00:00 Welcome to TechStrong TV

00:30 From Sygnia and Ermetic to BAND

02:30 The 2018 dream — when agents become economic players

04:00 Why agents need a Slack, not a social network

06:00 A common language for agents across frameworks

08:30 Connecting edge, cloud, and SaaS agents

11:30 Machine-speed traffic and the WhatsApp tech stack

13:30 The BAND business model and freemium tier

16:00 100 agents per person and what it unlocks

17:30 Where to find BAND and what to try first

Guest: Arick Goomanovsky, CEO & Co-Founder, BAND — https://band.ai

Host: Alan Shimel, TechStrong Group

Subscribe to TechStrong TV for more interviews with the leaders shaping enterprise tech.

#AgenticAI #AIAgents #InternetOfAgents #BAND #TechStrongTV