Descriptions:
Fryderyk Wiatrowski, co-founder of Viktor, presents the design philosophy and architecture behind Viktor — an AI employee that lives entirely inside Slack rather than a standalone web app. Launched in February 2026 as an experiment, Viktor saw immediate product-market fit and rapid worldwide adoption, and Wiatrowski uses the talk to explain why the team made that interface bet and what broke in the process.
The core argument is that powerful agents need asynchronous, ambient interfaces: a task that takes 10 minutes feels frustratingly slow in a chat UI but feels surprisingly fast compared to a human colleague in Slack. Viktor has access to 3,000 integrations and can build its own connectors for anything missing, giving it broad, horizontal context across an entire company — something Wiatrowski frames as a meaningful distinction from personal AI assistants. The talk covers Viktor’s lineage from JCAI (a DOM-based web agent that achieved state-of-the-art on WebArena in 2023) through Jace (an email agent built on Claude Sonnet 3.5) to the current Slack-native product.
Wiatrowski goes into detail on the engineering challenges unique to Slack as an interface: multi-modal input (DMs, threads, emoji reactions, message edits and deletions all feed the agent’s context), per-channel access control, and constructing a linear context window from non-linear conversation threads. The session is valuable for teams building enterprise agents and anyone thinking through the tradeoffs of ambient vs. dedicated AI interfaces.
📺 Source: AI Engineer · Published May 11, 2026
🏷️ Format: Keynote Launch
