Slack plans to add support for video calling to Huddles, rolling out in the fall
Adding video to Slack's popular Huddles feature could herald a new digital hang space—or just reinvent the video meetings wheel. — In the Before Times, we used to huddle in real life.
Context & Ripple Effects
Huddles began life in mid-2021 as an audio-only drop-in tool — the Clubhouse-style rooms Stewart Butterfield previewed before launch — with video conspicuously absent from the first release. Since then Slack's video moves have been asynchronous (Clips, the short video-voicemail feature for paid accounts) or outsourced: back in 2020 it shipped an app integrating Microsoft Teams calling plus VoIP hooks into Zoom, WebEx, and Jabber rather than building native calls.
Adding synchronous video to Huddles closes that gap inside Slack's own surface, turning a casual audio channel into a full meeting space — and pulling work Slack had been routing to Zoom and Teams back in-house.
First-order effects
- Slack users get native video calls inside Huddles this fall, removing the need to jump to Zoom or Teams for quick face-to-face conversations.
- Zoom and Microsoft Teams lose the informal, ad-hoc call segment to Slack, which until now deliberately integrated their calling features instead of competing with them.
Second-order effects
- Zoom and Teams are pushed to defend the lightweight-meeting use case — persistent rooms, low-friction join — where Slack's channel-based Huddles have a structural head start.
- Slack's own third-party calling integrations become less strategic: every video minute kept in Huddles is one no longer flowing through the Zoom and WebEx pipes it built apps for.
Third-order effects
- If chat platforms keep absorbing synchronous video natively, the standalone video-meeting app risks being demoted from destination to feature — with competition shifting to who owns the ambient workspace where meetings start.
- The pattern also suggests Slack's roadmap logic: ship the social layer first (audio rooms, clips, stories), then formalize it — meaning future Huddles additions would likely follow the same casual-to-structured arc.
The trend: Workplace chat platforms are absorbing video meetings as a native feature, collapsing the standalone video-call app into the collaboration hub where work already happens.