Pulse — AI Market Intelligence in Slack

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into## Inspiration

Staying on top of a market usually means a dozen browser tabs and an hour you don't have. I wanted that intelligence to come to me — inside the tool my team already lives in all day. So I built Pulse, an AI agent that lives in Slack.

What it does

Type /pulse Tesla, Rivian in any channel and Pulse returns a live, sourced news briefing in about ten seconds — each item a headline, a one-line "why it matters," and a real source link. It also responds to @Pulse <topics> and replies in a thread, so it answers exactly where you asked without cluttering the channel.

How we built it

Pulse runs on Slack's Bolt framework in Socket Mode, so it needs no public endpoint. It retrieves current news through the Tavily MCP server, and Claude summarizes each result into a one-line takeaway. Responses render as native Block Kit cards with source attribution. Both triggers share a single buildBriefing() path. It's deployed on Railway and runs 24/7 in the cloud.

Challenges we ran into

Slack's Real-Time Search API searches your workspace, not the web — so live web retrieval had to come from the MCP server instead.
Slack's 3-second acknowledgment rule: we ack immediately and post the briefing when it's ready.
MCP latency: the Anthropic SDK auto-retried timeouts, turning a 70s timeout into a 225s hang. Disabling retries and forcing a single combined search dropped runs to a reliable ~11s, 3/3 via MCP, zero timeouts.
Claude's web results injected citation tags into the text, which we strip before rendering.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Reliable ~11-second briefings retrieved genuinely through the MCP server (provable via mcp_tool_use log lines), two working triggers, graceful fallback (MCP to web search to cached), and a fully cloud-hosted agent shipped end to end by a first-time Slack builder.

What we learned

With modern tool-use APIs, the hard part of an AI agent is no longer the AI — it's choosing a narrow, useful job and shaping the experience around it. And the surface matters more than novelty: agents belong where work already happens.

What's next for Pulse

Scheduled daily briefings, per-channel watchlists, stricter source validation, and a Slack Marketplace listing. The watchlist adapts to any vertical — for example a shipping/freight-market config — so the same agent serves any team that needs to stay current.