How to Customize OpenClaw Settings in Your Slack Workspace

Getting Started with OpenClaw Configuration in Slack

Out of the box, SlackClaw gives your team a capable AI agent — but the real power comes from tailoring it to the way your team actually works. OpenClaw, the open-source agent framework running under the hood, is deeply configurable. Whether you want your agent to prioritize certain tools, remember recurring context about your projects, or behave differently in specific Slack channels, the settings are yours to shape.

This guide walks through the most impactful customizations you can make, from basic configuration to advanced skill definitions. By the end, your SlackClaw agent should feel less like a generic assistant and more like a teammate who genuinely knows your stack.

Accessing Your Agent Settings

Your SlackClaw instance runs on a dedicated server per team, which means your configuration is isolated and persistent — changes you make don't affect other workspaces, and nothing resets between sessions.

To access your settings, open any Slack channel where SlackClaw is active and use the slash command:

/claw settings

This opens the SlackClaw configuration panel in a modal. From here you'll see tabs for Agent Behavior, Integrations, Memory, Skills, and Billing. Most day-to-day customization happens across the first four tabs.

Configuring Agent Behavior

Setting a Default Persona and Tone

OpenClaw supports a system prompt that governs how your agent introduces itself, what tone it uses, and what it treats as a priority. You can edit this directly from the Agent Behavior tab.

A well-written system prompt might look like this:

You are an operations assistant for a B2B SaaS team.
Prioritize brevity in responses. When referencing tasks,
always link back to Linear. Escalate unresolved blockers
to the #eng-leads channel. Avoid suggesting tools outside
our approved stack unless explicitly asked.

Keep your system prompt focused. Overly long prompts tend to dilute instruction-following quality. Aim for clear priorities rather than exhaustive rules.

Channel-Specific Behavior

One of the more underused features is channel scoping. You can configure the agent to behave differently depending on where it's invoked. For example:

• #customer-success — Agent focuses on CRM lookups and drafting customer-facing communication, avoids surfacing internal Jira ticket details
• #engineering — Agent has full access to GitHub, Linear, and deployment logs
• #marketing — Agent prioritizes Notion docs, Google Analytics summaries, and content calendars

To configure this, navigate to Agent Behavior → Channel Rules and add a rule for each channel. Each rule can override the system prompt, restrict available tools, or change the response format.

Managing Integrations

SlackClaw connects to 800+ tools via one-click OAuth, which means you don't need to handle API keys manually for most services. The Integrations tab shows everything available, organized by category: project management, communication, development, data, and more. Learn more about our security features.

Connecting Your Core Tools

For most engineering and product teams, the highest-value integrations to activate first are: Learn more about our pricing page.

1. GitHub — Lets the agent search repos, summarize PRs, check CI status, and create issues on demand
2. Linear or Jira — Enables task lookup, status updates, and sprint summaries directly from Slack
3. Notion — Gives the agent access to your documentation so it can answer questions grounded in your actual team knowledge
4. Gmail or Google Workspace — Useful for drafting emails, summarizing threads, and managing calendar events
5. Datadog or PagerDuty — Allows the agent to surface incident status and alert summaries mid-conversation

To connect any of these, click the integration card and hit Connect. You'll be redirected through OAuth and returned to the panel once authorized. No copying tokens, no YAML files.

Setting Integration Permissions

After connecting a tool, you can fine-tune what the agent is allowed to do with it. For example, you might want the agent to read Jira tickets but not create or modify them without explicit confirmation. Toggle these permissions under Integrations → [Tool Name] → Permissions.

Pro tip: Set high-consequence integrations like Gmail or GitHub to confirm before acting mode. The agent will describe what it's about to do and wait for a thumbs-up emoji before executing. This is especially valuable when you're still getting comfortable with autonomous agent behavior.

Customizing Persistent Memory

Unlike session-based AI tools that forget everything when you close the tab, SlackClaw maintains persistent memory and context across conversations. This is one of its most powerful features — and it's worth spending time configuring deliberately.

Seeding Memory Manually

You can inject facts into the agent's memory directly using the /claw remember command:

/claw remember Our sprint cycle runs Monday to Friday. Standups are at 9am ET in #daily-standup. Our primary codebase is at github.com/acme/platform.

The agent will store this and reference it in future responses without you needing to re-explain it. Over time, you can build up a rich context layer that makes interactions significantly faster and more accurate.

Reviewing and Editing Stored Memory

To see what the agent currently remembers, run:

/claw memory list

This returns a structured list of all stored facts, tagged by source (manual, inferred, or integration-synced). You can delete individual entries or clear categories using:

/claw memory delete [entry-id]
/claw memory clear integrations

It's worth auditing this list every few weeks. As your team's tooling or processes change, outdated memory entries can cause the agent to make incorrect assumptions.

Automatic Context from Integrations

When integrations like Notion or Linear are connected, SlackClaw can automatically pull in context — like your current sprint goal, open blockers, or recently updated docs — and keep it fresh in memory. Enable this under Memory → Auto-Sync Sources and select which integrations should contribute to background context.

Building Custom Skills

Custom skills let you define repeatable workflows the agent can execute on command. Think of them as macros with intelligence built in.

Creating a Skill

Navigate to Skills → New Skill and define the following: For related insights, see OpenClaw Slack + Sentry Integration: Error Tracking Made Easy.

• Trigger phrase — What the user says to invoke the skill (e.g., "run standup summary")
• Steps — A sequence of actions using connected integrations
• Output format — How the result should be presented (bullet list, threaded reply, DM, etc.)

Here's an example skill definition for a daily engineering standup summary:

Skill: standup-summary
Trigger: "run standup summary"

Steps:
1. Fetch all Linear issues updated in the last 24 hours assigned to team "Engineering"
2. Fetch open PRs from github.com/acme/platform with status "review requested"
3. Check PagerDuty for any active incidents
4. Summarize findings in bullet format
5. Post to #daily-standup with @here mention

Once saved, any team member can trigger this with a simple Slack message. The agent handles all the API calls and formats the output — no manual aggregation required.

Skill Permissions

You can restrict which Slack users or roles are allowed to trigger specific skills. This is useful for skills that take write actions — like creating a GitHub release or sending a customer email. Configure this under Skills → [Skill Name] → Access Control.

Understanding Credit Usage

SlackClaw uses credit-based pricing with no per-seat fees, which means your whole team can use the agent without cost scaling linearly with headcount. Credits are consumed by agent actions — LLM calls, integration API calls, and memory operations.

To avoid surprise usage spikes, configure a monthly credit budget under Billing → Spending Limits. You can set hard caps per channel or per skill, and enable Slack notifications when you hit 70% and 90% of your monthly allocation.

Skills that chain multiple integrations together will consume more credits per run, so it's worth measuring usage on new skills before rolling them out broadly. Use Billing → Usage Breakdown to see which skills and channels are driving the most activity. For related insights, see OpenClaw Slack Governance: Policies for Enterprise Teams.

A Few Final Configuration Tips

Getting the most from your SlackClaw setup is an iterative process. Here are a few habits worth building:

• Start narrow, then expand. Connect two or three integrations your team uses every day before unlocking the full catalog. It's easier to build trust with a focused agent.
• Write memory entries in plain language. The agent doesn't need structured data — clear, conversational facts work best.
• Review skill logs weekly. The Skills → Activity Log shows exactly what the agent did and why. It's the fastest way to catch misconfigured steps.
• Use channel scoping aggressively. Different teams have legitimately different needs. A one-size-fits-all configuration usually serves no one particularly well.

Configuration isn't a one-time task — it's an ongoing conversation between your team and your agent. The more precisely you describe how your team works, the more useful the agent becomes. And because everything runs on your dedicated server with persistent memory, those improvements compound over time rather than resetting with every session.