Creating an OpenClaw Slack App
Discover how to create and configure an OpenClaw Slack app that enables your AI assistant to participate in team workflows. Learn to generate and apply Slack tokens, manage permissions through a manifest, control direct message access, invite the bot to channels, and troubleshoot common setup issues. By completing this lesson, you will enable your OpenClaw agent to effectively interact with Slack channels and team communications.
We'll cover the following...
By now, our OpenClaw instance is running and connected to WhatsApp, but right now, it is a capable assistant with no access to our actual work. Slack is the first tool integration that changes that. Once connected, your agent can read and write messages across channels, respond to mentions, track reactions, manage pins, and participate in your team's workflows, all from a single bot you control.
This lesson walks through the full setup from scratch. You will need a Slack workspace where you have admin access, or your own personal workspace to test with.
Not a workspace admin? You can still make this work. Anyone can create a Slack app on
api.slack.com/apps, but installing it to a company workspace requires admin approval. When you attempt to install the app later, Slack will detect that you do not have admin rights and will submit an approval request to your workspace admins instead of installing immediately.
Once an admin approves it, the Bot Token becomes available and you can proceed from there. The simplest path is to forward this lesson to whoever manages your Slack workspace and ask them to approve the app install, you handle all the configuration, they just click approve.
How does OpenClaw connect to Slack?
Before touching anything, it helps to understand what is actually happening here. Slack does not let third-party tools plug in directly; instead, we create a Slack app inside our workspace. That app acts as the official bridge: it has its own identity, its own set of permissions, and its own tokens that prove to Slack it is allowed to send ...