The tool doesn’t matter as much as where it lives.
I’ve been testing an AI agent called Viktor that plugs into Slack or Teams and works alongside your team inside the channel. It’s impressive. But the thing I keep coming back to isn’t Viktor. It’s the fact that none of this works if you don’t have a hub in the first place.
The real barrier isn’t capability
Most of the benefit AI can give you is already available. The problem is friction. Every new tool means learning it, configuring it, explaining your situation to it. That friction is why people get less out of AI than they could — not because the models aren’t good enough.
The tools that win are the ones that remove setup, not add it. That’s the direction everything is heading: less “learn how to use this,” more “tell it what you want and it figures out the rest.”
Work went distributed. Coordination didn’t catch up.
Almost nobody works in the same room anymore. Teams are remote, async, heads-down for stretches at a time. You can’t run a meeting every time something needs to move forward — that doesn’t scale, and it shouldn’t be the default anymore.
What you need instead is a shared place where work happens in view of the whole team, without requiring everyone to show up at the same time. That’s what Slack was built for. Teams is Microsoft’s answer to the fact that Slack solved a real problem first.
If you run a firm with two or more people, you need one or the other. Email threads and 1:1 calls get you by, but they don’t give anyone — including an AI agent — a shared view of what’s happening.
Why the hub matters more once AI enters the picture
An agent like Viktor works because it sits inside the hub where everyone already is. It sees what’s going on, and because it’s visible to the whole team, it can flag something falling through the cracks, pick up a task, or nudge a conversation forward — without you having to ask.
Compare that to how most people use ChatGPT or Claude today: one person, one conversation, mostly reactive. Useful, but it’s not the same as an assistant that’s watching the shared workspace and proactively taking things off your plate.
Where this is going
The parts of AI that used to require some technical sense — managing context, deciding which model to use, keeping conversations from getting too long — are becoming the AI’s problem, not yours. You won’t need to think about any of that. You’ll just show up and ask.
That’s already true in small ways. Connect an AI tool to your email and calendar, and it starts doing the sorting and remembering that used to take real effort to prompt for. Agents built for Slack and Teams take that further, because they’re not waiting for you to open a chat window. They’re already there.
Bottom line
If your firm doesn’t have a real hub — Slack or Teams, actually being used — that’s the first thing to fix. Everything AI can do for a team gets easier once there’s a shared place for it to operate in. Skip that step, and you’re bolting a powerful tool onto a workflow that was never built to support it.
;-)
Ernie
P.S. In the Inner Circle, we’re tracking which AI agents actually deliver on this — so you don’t have to test them all yourself.
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https://ernietheattorney.net/