Where should your AI agent live? Telegram, Slack, Discord, or web

The first real decision when standing up an agent is where customers (or your team) actually talk to it. We've put agents on every major messaging platform, and the answer for any given business is genuinely "it depends." Here's how we think it through with new customers.

Telegram

Best for: consumer-facing agents, single-operator ergonomics, anything that benefits from a bot you can DM personally.

Telegram has the cleanest bot API of any platform — the approve/deny inline buttons are crisp, message editing works reliably, and bot DMs feel immediate. For an agent that one person (or a small handful of people) talks to all day, Telegram is hard to beat.

Watch out for: customer support flows where you need an audit trail outside the chat — Telegram's history lives in Telegram. If compliance or handover-to-human matters, plan for export.

Slack

Best for: internal teams, agents that participate in channels rather than just DMs.

If your team already lives in Slack, dropping the agent into a channel and tagging it works extremely well. Threads keep conversations tidy; the audit trail is your existing Slack workspace; permissions piggyback on your existing user model.

Watch out for: rate limits on bot reactions (Slack is stricter than the others), and the "agent in every channel" problem — set boundaries on which channels it lives in or it becomes ambient noise.

Discord

Best for: community-facing agents, anything where the audience is already on Discord (gaming-adjacent, creator communities, dev tools).

Discord's bot model is mature, and the slash-command surface is excellent for structured interactions. Voice channels are even an option if you have a real use for them. The Discord audience skews technical, which is sometimes exactly what you want and sometimes exactly what you don't.

Watch out for: moderation expectations. Discord communities have opinions about bots in their servers; you'll want clear invocation patterns so the agent doesn't feel intrusive.

WhatsApp

Best for: customer-facing agents in markets where WhatsApp is the dominant channel (Latin America, India, much of Europe).

For customer-facing work, WhatsApp Business is often where your customers actually are. The integration is heavier than the others (you go through Meta's WhatsApp Business API and template approvals) and there are real per-message costs, but if your customers expect to find you on WhatsApp, the friction is worth it.

Watch out for: template messages (initiating a conversation outside the 24-hour window requires pre-approved templates), and the operational reality that this is more "enterprise messaging integration" than "hobbyist bot."

Web (chat widget or dedicated app)

Best for: public-facing agents on your website, anonymous interactions, anything where you want full control of the UX.

A web chat is the most flexible surface — you control the styling, the gating (login, captcha, rate limit), the data captured, the handover to a human. But you also own all of that, including the moderation question (what happens when someone sends abuse? how do you triage?).

Watch out for: anonymous-input load if the widget is on a high-traffic page. Plan rate limits and abuse handling on day one, not after the first incident.

How to actually choose

We ask three questions on the scoping call:

1. Who is the user?If it's you and a couple of operators, Telegram. If it's your team, Slack. If it's your community, Discord. If it's your customers, WhatsApp or web (depending on geography).
2. Where do they already are?Don't make people install a new app for your agent. Meet them on the platform they're already using all day.
3. What's the audit + handover story? Some conversations need to be findable, exportable, escalatable. That constraint narrows the choice faster than ergonomics does.

The agent itself works the same way on every surface — same memory, same tools, same approvals. The platform is the front door, not the personality.