A recent piece in The Information made a bold claim: Anthropic says its AI can now clone enterprise apps like Slack. Whether or not you agree with their assertion, the direction of travel is obvious. With code generation, agents, and subagents, pioneering a sophisticated, multi-surface product is rapidly becoming less about stitching frameworks and more about describing intent. That lowers the barrier to build. It doesn’t lower the bar to run.
If you can compose a Slack-class experience in a weekend, the next question is, “what happens on Monday when the first 100,000 users show up from five continents, on spotty networks, with strict data residency rules, and a flood of realtime events?” Users don’t care how clever your prompts were. They care that messages arrive in milliseconds – every time, for everyone.
This is where infrastructure services like PubNub move from optional to essential — giving builders the speed, scale, and reliability to move fast and stay ahead.
AI makes "big app" builds feasible. Operations make them durable.
Large interactive apps share the same operational demands, no matter who wrote the first line of code:
- Redundancy and reliability: Architect for component and region failure without impacting end users.
- Security and trust: Encrypt in transit and at rest, enforce access, and prove compliance.
- Data replication and restoration: Define RPO/RTO as product requirements, not back-office chores.
- Regional regulatory compliance: Keep data where it must live, and prove it readily.
- Observability and response: Live dashboards, alerts, and the muscle memory to act.
- Global network realities: Peering quirks, throttling, and “mystery” ISP behaviors do happen.
- Real-time at scale: Presence, fan-out, ordering guarantees, backpressure, catch-up after disconnects.
These are not projects forged in a weekend. They are long-term capabilities painstakingly developed with time. As AI removes friction from writing software, it spotlights the need for a platform designed to run interactive software, globally and in real time.
What “run” looks like in action.
Let’s make it concrete with a Slack-like workload. Your app needs to:
- Fan out messages to thousands of subscribers with low latency and predictable delivery.
- Maintain user presence, typing indicators, and read receipts with minimal overhead.
- Persist chat history with controlled retention and secure access.
- Survive mobile networks – reconnect gracefully, deliver missed messages, and avoid duplication.
- Respect data residency obligations across regions while still delivering a unified experience.
- Monitor and act – when latency spikes in one geography, route around it and alert ops.
You can design much of an application’s code with AI. The operations are where products live or die.
The PubNub blueprint for AI-scale apps.
PubNub empowers builders to focus on creating great products while we handle the heavy lifting of realtime operations.
- Global scale and reliability. Our network spans 15+ Points of Presence, with sub-100 ms delivery targets and a 99.999% SLA to ride through load spikes and regional incidents.
- Security and compliance. TLS in transit, optional AES-256 encryption end to end, and a compliance posture that includes HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, and CCPA support.
- Data residency and governance. Control where your data lives to meet regulatory requirements with zero redesign.
- Edge processing and workflows. Run logic on the stream for moderation, translation, routing, and event-driven automation with PubNub Functions and our event hub—no servers to patch, no autoscale groups to tune.
- Proven, real-time throughput. PubNub fuels trillions of API calls monthly and reaches hundreds of millions of devices, so you can launch architecture with confidence, not guesswork.
That feature stack—global network, security and compliance, data governance, edge execution, and sustained realtime throughput—is the blueprint, the “run” substrate your AI-built application needs to succeed.
Why it matters more because of AI.
As AI slashes the cost and time to produce complex software, differentiation shifts from who can ship it to who can operate it with confidence. The winners will:
- Ship features at record speed and keep latency low as usage grows.
- Expand globally without rewriting for new regions or regulations.
- Evolve products from single-player interactions to shared, synchronized experiences—chat, collaboration, live ops, device control—without re-architecting the backend.
PubNub was carefully crafted for that operating reality. Our job is to absorb the variability of the internet, safeguard data in the right place, and make realtime feel effortless to your users.
A simple decision rule.
If AI helps you build something that looks like a large, interactive app—chat, collaborative editing, live customer support, multiplayer, IoT control—don’t try to own the pipes. Own the experience. Offload the hard parts of run: reliability, security, data governance, and real-time performance at global scale.
The promise in The Information article is exciting: AI that can assemble “Slack-class” apps. The opportunity is bigger: products that are always on, responsive everywhere, and trusted by default. That’s the bar your customers will hold you to—and that’s the bar PubNub helps you clear.
