Viktor: AI Coworker That Lives in Slack — Fryderyk Wiatrowski

Channel: aiDotEngineer

Published at: 2026-05-11

YouTube video id: ohKt066uFhg

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohKt066uFhg

Um, cool. So, my name is Frederick. I'm
the co-founder of Victor. Um, Victor is
the AI employee that probably most of
you have heard of already. It's
absolutely blowing up. We launched it in
February this year. zero expectations of
growing at all. It was actually an
experiment and it surprised all of us.
Immediate product market fit, you know,
huge adoption worldwide and yeah, we
can't uh we can't catch up. Um so what
what is Victor? Victor is an AI
employee. And when you think of an AI
employee,
um, you should think of it as
just like a human employee, you know,
lives where you live, lives in Slack, it
doesn't have a web app. Um, so just like
your teammates, you don't need to go to
a separate place to to call it. It
participates in your discussions in
threads, in channels,
and it has access to to the tools that
you have access to. um it has access to
3,000 integrations and if for some
reason it doesn't have access to your
integrations, it can build its own
connections. So essentially, Victor can
use any tools that your company uses.
And therefore, Victor has the context of
all of your tools. And as opposed to
human employees, Victor has a horizontal
and broad context about the whole
company. And for example, when you
currently hire a CMO,
you can probably assume that this CMO
would be much better if it has had
access to your codebase, if it was able
to contribute to your, you know, uh to
to your codebase. Um and Victor can do
this. So it's bringing this kind of um
universal PhD level understanding to all
of the areas of the company.
Let's start with a quick story of Victor
and the company. Um, our mission from
the very early days in 2023 was to build
AI employees. And back then it was, you
know, after chat GPT has launched. Back
then we thought that the right way to
build AI employees is is is through
browsers. Um, as a reminder, we didn't
have tool calling. we didn't have like
you know great code generating models.
So you know probably the right way to
take actions was was through browsers.
You know browsers are like very
universal interfaces. Um you can
essentially use any tools through a
browser. Uh most apps have have have uh
browser apps that that you can interact
with. And the way back then it was
called JCAI was working. uh it was
taking a snapshot of your DOM min
minifying it in a lossless way um and
then based on the snapshot and this
minified snapshot and your goal it was
deciding on the next step. So, for
example, should I type something in in
the search bar in Google or should I
click on a login button to login? Um,
and it was great. You know, it's it
certainly should work, right? Um, and it
did, but it didn't work for a lot of
steps with the current cap with the
previous cap capabilities of the models
was like back in 2023, it was working
for like three to five five steps
reliably. And by reliably I mean with
60% reliability and you know that was
compounding with with each step and so
uh that was still state-of-the-art. So
JCAI was a state-of-the-art web agent on
on the most popular agenting benchmark
called called web arena and uh and it
was doing well but it was very difficult
to make it into a useful product just
because of the reliability and the speed
issues. currently you can just call a
few tools or like you know call a
function and it will immediately give
you an output and with the web agents
you know you have to wait a minute until
it fails. So it was quite quite hard but
but web agents are amazing and you know
um they're finally working much better
than in the past. Um cool. So you know
uh after that uh JCI became an email
agent. So you know uh Sonet 3.5 came uh
we have built our face first agent loop
and we really wanted to have the
experience of you not having to go to a
web app to ask the agent to do something
but rather the agent having all the
necessary context and being able to
proactively come up with the tasks for
you. Um and we achieved that with Jace.
Jayce was like an amazing product also
great product market fit. Um
and it's still it's still alive. You
should you should check it out.
Basically, the way it works is, you
know, whenever an email arrives, an
agent loop is triggered, connects to
your tools, can react to emails, not
only with email drafts, but also with
with with uh tool calls. For example, if
someone asks for a refund, the agent can
automat automatically do a refund for
you. Of course, can be gated with
approvals as well. Um, cool. Uh, but
then, you know, this February, we
launched Victor. uh Victor you know
probably everyone I mean we are in the
open claw slack so in open claw track so
everyone knows of open claw which is a
personal agent and we always wanted to
build the employee which is the company
agent and that's the first question you
should ask yourself is like how is it
different what is the difference between
the company agent and the and the
personal agent so um first
we think uh that company agents should
live where you live work where you
network and have all the company context
and that you know I if um if if you're
building a personal agent then probably
everyone from the company connects their
own integrations and you know runs those
agents on their own uh with Victor and
with the company agents is different
because suddenly it's sufficient for one
person from the company to to connect an
integration Victor will inherit the
permissions from this integrations or
like you can tune it and then the whole
team has access to it so you don't need
to connect them a 100 times so as I said
before 3,000 tools um lives in Slack and
essentially does anything across roles
and um that comes with challenges and as
you can imagine um
as you can imagine like that um I'll
talk about one mainly here. So the the
first challenge with you know coming
from a a personal agent to a team agent
and you know not having one user but any
users is
is around memory. So with open claw
there was a big concern about the memory
getting clutter cluttered over time and
I think that's a you know serious and it
it makes sense to be concerned about
this right um but imagine that you have
the same architecture and the same
memory but now for a 100 users and not
one user so it's probably running out of
the memory a 100 times faster. It's a
big challenge to be solved. Um and we
have solved it. Uh another thing is
Slack has different channels and and
companies have you know different
different hierarchies that we need to
adhere to and people will often give the
agents conflict conflicting
instructions. But let's imagine that you
have Victor your company agent in one
channel in the growth channel and then
in the engineering channel and also in
people's DMs. So um Victor will you know
take the context from the growth channel
uh or will take the context from the
executive channel and you somehow need
to make sure that this context will not
be leaked to the engineering or support
channel. Similarly if you DM Victor with
your problems um Victor should not take
the context from the growth channel
unless you are from the growth team. So
it adds a lot of complexity on how uh
how how the access is structured.
And
you know we chose Slack as our interface
for what we think is AGI for companies.
And there is a reason for this. I'll say
I'll start to I I'll first talk about
the reasons and then what breaks in
Slack. Um so there are two two major
reasons. First we wanted it Victor to
feel like a human employee and you don't
interact with human employees in web
apps. to interact with them in in Slack
just your teammates, right? Um and
um and the number two reason for
choosing Slack as an interface is that
if Victor is like a very powerful agent
and it's supposed to perform difficult
tasks,
then those tasks will not execute
immediately. They they can take like 10
minutes to execute, right? Uh naturally.
So when you go to a web app and ask an
agent to do something for you, so you
switched context and now you need to
wait 10 minutes for the answer or for
the output. It's quite frustrating,
right? Like you don't want to wait. You
are used to from chat GPT, you're used
to immediate answers. It it should take
like 30 seconds and it's done. Thank
you. Copy paste and I'm done. Um
but it's not how it works with the
powerful agents. So why is Slack better?
Well, now if you ping someone on Slack
and tell them to build an app for you
and get an answer in 10 minutes, you are
shocked. No teammate has ever built you
an app in 10 minutes, right? So, so kind
of the perception is different and
suddenly the latency is is very low uh
when you compare it to uh to to to your
normal Slack experience. But there are
certain things that break in slack. And
uh number one is that you know when you
work in web apps you have a single kind
of um um single thread. You open uh you
open a new agent or a new new thread and
you you speak to this agent. However,
when you are in Slack, you have a lot of
interaction modes. One of them is DMing
people. Another one is being in public
channels and particip participating in
threads. Another one is just reacting
with emojis. You know, you can also edit
your messages and stuff. And all of this
is is an input to an agent. And all of
that needs to fit into a linear context
somehow, not in a single thread, right?
And we we need to manage this.
So, let me give you an example. Um, of
course, when someone deletes a message,
a human assumes that the task should not
be continued or it's not interesting
anymore. When someone edits a message,
you should also respond to to an edit.
Um, but let's say you are DMing your
coworker, whether that's Victor or your
friend, and you start a thread in Slack,
right? Um, but at some point, and that
humans do it very often, you forget
about the thread and you just start a
new DM to the same person. um should you
start and you open a new sandbox
and humans normally have the context
from the previous thread but for the
agent is it's a totally new area it's a
new task right so what needs to happen
then is you need to somehow always
whenever Victor receives a DM look at
the previous messages and somehow roll
them over to the to the to the existing
conversations um so this is just one of
the challenges that you need to face Um,
fun fact, we noticed, you know, I I
didn't think it would be as important as
as it actually is, but what really
matters is the tone. I'll give you an
example from one of our customers. Um,
you know, we were testing, so we use
Opus 4.6 now for Victor. Um, and we were
used as as the kind of the main model
and we were using um, we wanted to try
GPT 5.4 before and on the tool calling
and codegen it's actually amazing you
know it should work and it's actually
cheaper as well so why not replace OPUS
with GPD 5.4 before uh and there's one
reason we we didn't go for it. There's a
couple, but one the most interesting one
is the personality.
Um, for some reason our users can be due
to our architecture, but they loved Opus
and they all started raging when we did
we did the AB test. So, uh, I think
there is something beautiful in in that
model that um, you know, um, we can
learn from and Opus is a bit sassy as
well in Victor. I'm not sure if that's
thanks to our team or who made it this
way, but uh, actually quite funny. I
encourage everyone to try um
proactivity. One of the kind of powerful
things that Victor can do is proactively
suggest you the workflows that it can
automate. So let's say you're in a
growth team and you discuss an AB test
and the results and at some point you
realize okay this one option is
performing really well. I'll go for this
option instead of the other one. Um,
Victor has access to your post hog or
whatever tool you use for analytics and
it can literally check and realize and
it will do so if what you're saying is
not some
It happened a couple of times that you
know you're discussing some experiments.
Victor checked post hog and said hey you
know it's true but like this is not
statistically significant and then it
has run a calculation of why I'm saying
some Um, so it's fun. It's an
advantage, right? If if Victor can
suddenly join a conversation and be
helpful, it will be activated more
broadly in the workspace, which is great
for the product. But if Victor does it
on day one and it happened, um the
security teams start raging because
someone adds Victor to your workspace
and suddenly Victor starts DMing
everyone and then participating in the
threads and the security is going crazy.
Um that's why I think you should earn it
with the first us with a few users first
and then can you can roll it out
broadly. Um
exactly
um
yeah so the value of shared context I
don't have much time left but um I'll
very quickly talk about the difference
between Victor and agents like cloud
code or like cloud co-work or whatever.
Um now cloud coord works on your desktop
so it's a bit different. Uh the
advantage of victor is that it works in
cloud. You don't need to have your
computer open for it to work. And
another thing is the shared context. So
as I said at the beginning for victor to
work well for you to be able to you know
ask Victor to change your meta ads
budget or like to read your analytics
data only one person from the company
needs to connect this integration.
Right? Imagine that you work in a 100
person team and your growth team is 20
people. If you have to ask 20 people to
connect your meta ads everyone
individually, it's quite painful.
Furthermore, if someone wants to
interact with Victor um
and like if Victor wants to be
proactive, everyone connects their own
integration, someone can connect their
own wrong integration, right? and Victor
can be just very stuck and wrong and you
know might not know which integration to
use which adds a lot of complexity uh
for the user.
Um, cool. And something I want to
highlight here is that Victor is not a
tool. It's a hire.
And here's what I mean. I'll tell you
one customer story. One of the biggest
e-commerce brands in the in the United
States, they
admined Victor and the first
integration, a team integration that
they connected was their personal email,
personal Gmail. And then suddenly the
team started speaking to Victor about
this guy's emails.
And um and this guy is is is texting me
and saying, "Hey man, like what the
hell? Victor is leaking all of my data.
Why are you doing this?" And I'm like,
"Why did you give Victor access to your
personal email?" Like, you know, if you
hire a new employee, do you give them
access to your personal email? Probably
not, right? Um, that said, I think it
was a great inspiration and what we did
is we added a capability to Victor to
kind of scope the integrations. So,
they're not always shared. And if you
want to have your personal integration,
your personal email and want Victor to
like in your DMs or publicly uh be able
to use it when you call it, uh, this is
also possible now. Um,
yeah.
And and so to summarize um what does it
take for an AI coworker to be great? I
think there are three major pillars if
you want to build your coworker. I this
is a technical crowd. So I encourage
everyone here to try to build your own
victor. Um and uh you know there are
just three things you may need to make
work. Helps get work done quite easy.
Models are capable today. Um you know
connector integration through pipedream
will work well. knows the company, has
the context from Slack, make sure you're
able to utilize this context well, um,
you will probably need to go through the
Slack approval process, which is very
difficult and can be can be boring, and
then make it friendly. It makes a
difference and you should um make sure
that Victor likes your team, your team
likes Victor. Um, this is our vision for
the future. Every company has AI
employees. I think it's obvious, not
nothing to argue here. Um and
historically um I just want to highlight
the vision for AGI has been with us
since the 17th century. Um Godfrey Litz
the inventor of calculus um was
reasoning about you know humans doing
unnecessary things and he wanted to
build a calculator. Um little did he
know you know a calculation is not the
not the only cognitive task that that we
can automate and I think um we are now
in this beautiful moment in history
where um where where we can essentially
automate all the cognitive tasks and we
we can be part of the revolution. So
I'll just let myself read his quote. Um
it is unworthy of excellent men to lose
hours like slaves in the labor of
calculation. Let let us leave that to
machines. And with that, I just wanted
to encourage everyone to
scan this QR code, click on sign up, and
add Victor to your Slack. Test it out.
Everyone in this room has $100 in free
credits. No string is attached. You can
just remove remove Victor at any time.
It will add a lot of value. I promise.
If it doesn't, give me a call. I'll make
sure it does. Thank you.