I Gave Deep Research the Keys to My Slack
Ten seconds of setup and now an AI agent is loose in my infrastructure.
Ten seconds to connect Deep Research to Slack via MCP. The hard part being that the MCP server didn't have search — that was the right observation. The plumbing is trivial now; the surface area is the product.
Ten seconds.
That's how long it took to connect OpenAI's Deep Research to my custom tooling once MCP landed on the platform. Plug in the server URL, watch it handshake, done. The hard part — the part that took longer than ten seconds — was realizing my Slack MCP didn't have a search function, and apparently Deep Research has opinions about that.
It wants two things: search and document retrieval. Which makes sense — you can't do research without being able to ask a question and get a document back. So I cracked open the custom server, wired up the search endpoint per the spec, and pushed it.
Now it's running. Against my actual Slack. Looking for whatever it decides is relevant to whatever it decides to research.
I don't know how it's going to do. That's not me being modest — I genuinely have no model of what happens when a research agent with long-horizon planning and tool use gets pointed at six years of team communication. Maybe it surfaces something brilliant. Maybe it reads every embarrassing message I sent in 2022 and incorporates it into a synthesis document.
Will report back. Probably.
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