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SLACK INTEGRATION

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Put your agents where your team already works.

Give an agent its own Slack bot and your team can send tasks, get answers, and tap Approve — without opening the desktop app. Or wire Slack as a live data source so agents read channels and post structured results into workflows.

See it in action

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A Slack message, round-trip.

From channel mention to agent processing to threaded reply — three stops, one seamless loop. Pick a stage:

#sales-ops
dana@sales can you pull the Q3 pipeline summary for Northwind?
message received · bot mention · routed to sales agent
The bot receives the message via Socket Mode — an outbound WebSocket from Actionist to Slack. No inbound port, no firewall rule, no public URL needed.
agent · sales · processing
tool · Search Memory · “northwind pipeline q3”
memoryNorthwind — enterprise tier, renewal October, champion Dana Voss. Last pipeline entry: $48k open.
tool · slack_post_message · composing reply
The agent runs inside Actionist — it can call any tool it has access to: Memory search, CRM lookup, web browsing, or another MCP. The Slack message is just the trigger.
#sales-ops · thread
dana@sales can you pull the Q3 pipeline summary for Northwind?
sales botNorthwind Q3: $48k open, renewal in October. Champion Dana Voss. Last touch: demo follow-up sent June 4.
sales botWant me to draft a check-in email to Dana?
The reply lands in the thread — keeping channels clean. If the agent needs sign-off on an action, it posts Approve and Deny buttons into the same thread.
Two modes

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Know which one you need.

Slack works with Actionist in two completely separate ways. Understand the difference before you set anything up.

Agents → Channels tab

The agent lives as a Slack bot. Your team sends it tasks, asks questions, and taps Approve/Deny buttons inline — all from Slack. Set up via Agents → select an agent → Channels tab.

Apps → MCPs tab

The agent reads and writes Slack as a data source. Send structured messages to channels, read thread history, search for users. Set up via Apps → MCPs tab, then install slack-oauth.

Most teams will want both. Channel mode handles conversation and approvals; MCP mode handles data actions inside workflows.
Channel (bot) mode

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Connect a Slack bot to an agent.

Each agent can have its own dedicated bot, or multiple agents can share one Slack app and be routed by @mention. The wizard walks you through three steps.

1

Create a Slack app

Go to api.slack.com/apps, create a new app, enable Socket Mode, and grant the bot these scopes: chat:write, im:history, channels:history, groups:history.Copy both tokens from the app settings — you will need them in the next step:
  • Bot token — starts with xoxb-
  • App-level token — starts with xapp-
Then open Agents in the Actionist sidebar, select the agent you want on Slack, and click the Channels tab. Find the Slack card and click Configure.
2

Enter your tokens and set a mention name

Paste both tokens into the Bot token (xoxb-…) and App-level token (xapp-…) fields, or pick saved credentials from your vault — both must come from the same source (both pasted or both vault-picked; mixing the two is not allowed).In the Set a mention name (for shared channels) step, type a short identifier like support or finance. When multiple agents share one Slack app, users type @support do something to route to this agent. Leave blank if this agent has its own dedicated Slack app.Mention names are auto-lowercased and restricted to [a-z0-9_-].
3

Validate the tokens

Click Connect. Actionist calls auth.test to verify the bot is reachable. On success the card shows Connected · token saved and displays the workspace name. The bot auto-connects on every app launch, with up to 8 retry attempts.
OverviewChannelsToolsMemory
Slack
Socket Mode bot
1
Bot token (xoxb-…)
xoxb-4812093847-8201938740-2f9c…
App-level token (xapp-…)
xapp-1-A082R…-12345…
Vault-bound tokens resolve at gateway connect. Never stored locally.
2
Set a mention name (for shared channels)
support
3
Validate tokens
Connect
OverviewChannelsToolsMemory
Slack
Socket Mode bot
Connected · token saved
Connected to Acme Corp · acme.slack.com
Vault-bound tokens resolve at gateway connect. Never stored locally.
Multi-agent pattern

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One Slack workspace, multiple agents.

Create a single Slack app and share its tokens across all your agents. Give each agent a unique mention name. Your team routes to the right specialist with a single @mention.

Slack workspace
one shared app
@sales do X
@finance do Y
DM (no mention needed)
Sales agent
Finance agent
Any agent (DM routing)
DMs always route to the agent without requiring a mention name. In shared channels, the user must type @mention-name do something. Messages in a channel that don’t include an @mention are silently dropped — the bot does not reply.
Each agent’s mention name must be unique across agents sharing the same Slack app. Duplicate mention names will fail validation at save.
Approvals

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Approve or deny without leaving Slack.

When an agent hits a step that needs your sign-off, it posts Approve and Deny buttons directly into the Slack thread using Slack Block Kit. One tap resolves the approval — no need to open the Actionist desktop app.

#finance · thread
jordan@finance send the Q3 invoice to [email protected]
finance botReady to send invoice #INV-2041 ($12,400) to [email protected]. Confirm?
ApproveDeny
Inline approval buttons work from any device where you have Slack — including mobile.
#finance · thread
jordan@finance draft a payment confirmation for [email protected]
finance botDrafted confirmation email for [email protected]. Subject: Payment received — Invoice #INV-2041.
finance botSend this email to [email protected]?
ApproveDeny
MCP tool mode

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Use Slack as a data source in workflows.

Install the bundled slack-oauth MCP server and any agent can send messages to channels, read thread history, and search for users — making Slack a live input and output for scheduled workflows.

1

Open the MCP catalog

In the Actionist sidebar, click Apps, then select the MCPs tab. Search for “Slack” and find the slack-oauth entry.
2

Authenticate via OAuth

Click Install. Actionist opens a browser OAuth window to Slack. Authorize the requested scopes: channels:read, channels:history, chat:write, users:read, files:read, groups:read, im:read, mpim:read.
3

Use Slack tools in your agents

Once connected, agents can call Slack actions such as sending messages, reading channel history, and looking up users — as steps in any workflow.
The Slack MCP server connects over HTTP/SSE to https://mcp.slack.com/mcp. No additional local server setup is required.
Best practices

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Tips before you go live.

Use vault credentials, not pasted tokens

Select tokens from the credential picker rather than pasting them directly. Vault-bound tokens are resolved server-side at connect time and never written to local storage. If a token is ever compromised, you can rotate it from the Credentials Vault without re-editing every agent that uses it.
You cannot paste the bot token and vault-pick the app-level token — both must be pasted together or both vault-picked. Mixed mode is rejected with an error: “Both the bot token and the app-level token are required — paste both, or pick saved credentials for both.”
Slack’s Socket Mode uses an outbound WebSocket, not an inbound HTTPS endpoint. No port forwarding, no public URL, and no firewall rule changes are required. It works behind corporate firewalls.
Mention names are auto-lowercased to [a-z0-9_-] characters. Two agents sharing the same Slack app cannot have the same mention name — saving will fail with a validation error. Use short, role-specific names (sales, finance, support).
When you publish an agent to the Actionist marketplace, both Slack tokens are automatically stripped. Subscribers who install the agent must add their own Slack app credentials. This applies to both the bot token and the app-level token.
For agents running on a Paired VPS, the Connect button is disabled until the VPS is online. If you see “Saved — connecting on your VPS…”, the connection is queued and will complete once the runtime heartbeat is detected. Check the Cloud tab if the VPS appears offline.
Limits

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Limits and gotchas.

10,000character cap on text file attachments (.txt, .md, .csv, .json, etc.)
5 MBmax image attachment size; first photo only, passed as base64
5 minmessage deduplication window; map capped at 1,000 entries
24 charsmax suggestion pill text; tokens expire after 1 hour
8bot startup retry attempts with a 1.5-second delay between each
[a-z0-9_-]mention name charset, auto-lowercased
Slack reaction emoji calls from the agent are currently no-ops. The agent cannot add or remove reactions on Slack messages.
Bare channel messages (no @mention) are silently dropped — the bot does not reply. Channel management in the web app returns “Unavailable” for locally-hosted agents; manage from the desktop app.
Recipes

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Three automations worth stealing.

Copy any of these into your own agent. Each one runs entirely through the Slack bot — no desktop app open required.

Maya · Marketing Manager

Every weekday at 08:30, the agent reads the last 24 hours of #marketing and #launches, surfaces the top 3 threads that need a reply, and posts a tidy digest into #team-digest — tagged by urgency. The whole channel sees it before standup; Maya skips 20 minutes of scroll.

saves ~20 min/day
Sam · Solo founder

When a pull-request sits in #eng-prs for more than 4 hours with no reviewer reaction, the agent DMs the on-call reviewer with a direct link and a one-line summary of the diff. If it hits 8 hours, it nudges a second reviewer. Typical PRs go from open to reviewed same day — no nag messages written by hand.

saves ~3 hrs/wk
Priya · Support lead

Customers post in #support. The agent reads each new thread, checks the knowledge base for a matching answer, and either replies directly with a resolution or labels the thread NEEDS-HUMAN and pings the on-call rep. Roughly 6 in 10 threads resolve without a human reply. Priya reviews the queue in one pass instead of monitoring the channel all day.

saves ~1.5 hrs/day
One bot, every team member

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Your agents, where your team lives.

Connect once. Your whole team can message, task, and approve — without leaving Slack, without opening the desktop app.

Open the DashboardEmail the team

Tokens stored in the encrypted Credentials Vault — never in local storage.
Socket Mode · Block Kit approvals · MCP data actions.

Keep going

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Related topics.

Channels

The full Channels surface — Telegram, Slack, and how both fit into the agent model.

MCP

How to install and configure MCP servers, including the Slack MCP OAuth flow.

Credentials

The encrypted Credentials Vault — store and rotate Slack tokens without touching agent config.

Cloud

Run Slack bots 24/7 on a Paired VPS so they stay online when your laptop is closed.