Day 16 of 28 · OpenClaw Challenge
Connecting to Slack or Teams
⏱ 7 min
📊 Intermediate
Email is one-to-one. But most team communication lives in Slack or Microsoft Teams — channels, threads, group messages, and a firehose of notifications.
Today your agent learns to swim in that firehose.
The problem with team chat
You step into a 2-hour meeting. When you come back, there are 87 unread messages across 6 channels. Some are important. Most aren't. But you can't tell without reading all of them.
That scanning and sorting? That's exactly what your agent can do for you.
Knowledge Check
What's the biggest challenge with Slack/Teams notifications?
A
The interface is confusing
B
Messages expire too quickly
C
The signal-to-noise ratio — important messages get buried in a flood of updates
D
There aren't enough messages
The real problem isn't the tool — it's volume. Important decisions, questions directed at you, and critical updates get buried under memes, thread replies, and automated notifications. Your agent separates signal from noise.
What your agent can do in Slack
Once connected, your agent can:
Monitor — watch specific channels for important messages
Summarize — give you a digest of what you missed
Alert — ping you immediately when something urgent appears
Draft — prepare responses for questions directed at you
I just got out of a 2-hour meeting. What did I miss in Slack?
Scanning your channels...
Here's what happened while you were away:
🔴 **#engineering** — Jake found a P1 bug in production. The team deployed a hotfix 40 min ago. Tests passing. He's asking if you want a post-mortem scheduled.
🟡 **#product** — Sarah shared the updated roadmap. 3 people commented with concerns about the Q2 timeline. No decision made yet.
🔵 **#general** — HR posted about the holiday party. Someone asked about the dress code. Not relevant to you.
🔵 **#random** — 14 messages about lunch recommendations. Safely ignorable.
**Action needed**: Reply to Jake about the post-mortem. Want me to draft a response?
Yes, tell Jake to schedule a post-mortem for tomorrow.
Done ✓ — posted in #engineering:
"Nice work on the quick fix, Jake. Let's do a post-mortem — can you schedule one for tomorrow afternoon? Include the on-call team."
Anything else from the Slack summary?
↻ Replay conversation
Knowledge Check
The agent categorized messages with red, yellow, and blue indicators. What do they represent?
C
Different Slack channels
D
Priority levels — red for action needed, yellow for awareness, blue for low priority
The agent triaged your messages by priority, not just by channel. Red means "you need to act," yellow means "you should know," blue means "safe to ignore." That's the filtering you'd spend 15 minutes doing manually.
Proactive monitoring
Your agent doesn't have to wait until you ask "what did I miss?" It can monitor channels in real-time and alert you when something matters:
🚨 Heads up — Jake just posted in #engineering that the staging environment is down. 3 people are waiting on it for testing.
Can you check what's wrong?
Checked the server logs. The staging database ran out of disk space. I can run the cleanup script to free up space, or alert the DevOps team. What do you prefer?
Done ✓ — freed up 12GB of disk space. Staging is back up. I've posted an update in #engineering letting the team know.
↻ Replay conversation
Knowledge Check
In the staging outage example, when did the user first learn about the problem?
A
They didn't — the agent handled it silently
B
When they checked Slack manually
C
When the agent proactively alerted them
D
When a team member called them
The agent was monitoring #engineering and alerted the user immediately when it detected a problem. The user didn't have to be watching Slack — the agent was watching for them.
Setting boundaries
Your agent should be helpful, not annoying. Set rules for when to alert you and when to stay quiet:
"Only alert me for P1 bugs and messages from my manager."
"Summarize #general once a day, don't alert in real-time."
"Never post on my behalf without asking first."
These rules go into your custom instructions from yesterday. The agent follows them consistently.
Final Check
What's the most important rule to set when connecting your agent to Slack?
A
Which emoji it should use
B
When to alert you vs. when to stay quiet — so it filters noise instead of adding to it
C
What time zone to display
D
Which channels to delete
The whole point of connecting to Slack is to reduce noise, not add to it. Setting clear rules about what warrants an alert vs. what goes in a daily summary is the most important configuration step.
💬
Day 16 Complete
"Your agent watches your team channels so you don't have to. Signal in, noise out."
Tomorrow — Day 17
Automating Recurring Tasks
You've connected your tools. Now let's make your agent work on autopilot for repeating tasks.