When OpenClaw went viral earlier this year, the reaction from most people I talked to was some mix of impressed and afraid. The idea that an open-source AI personal assistant could negotiate a car deal or fight your insurance company over WhatsApp while you slept was…a lot to process.
In case you're only tangentially familiar, OpenClaw is made up of two parts—an AI agent that runs on a computer or server you control, and a gateway that lets you talk to it from a messaging app like WhatsApp or Telegram. The agent is powered by an LLM of your choosing, and because it lives on your machine, it can access things like your file system, command line, calendar, and email.
There's also a large community of users who have built skills for OpenClaw, connecting it to various third-party apps. Lots of those skills have been flagged as malicious, though. With an agent that has direct access to your machine, granting the wrong access can turn catastrophic pretty quickly, especially if you're using it for work.
That's where Zapier MCP can help. It gives OpenClaw governed, enterprise-ready access to 8,000+ apps in our directory and 30,000+ actions. That way, the agent can take real actions in your tech stack without ever touching your raw credentials, and you control exactly which actions it's allowed to run. Below, I'm sharing five non-technical workflows you can set up today in OpenClaw, each with a copy-paste-ready prompt and a pre-built tool bundle to get you started.
Warning: OpenClaw is powerful, but it comes with risks. Zapier MCP sidesteps the biggest pitfalls by keeping your automated workflows scoped and transparent. But no matter how you're automating, it's worth understanding the safety risks before you start using it.
Table of contents
Note: The tool bundles in this post are pre-populated with apps, but you can easily swap them out for any app you want from our directory.
How to connect OpenClaw to Zapier MCP
Before you try these workflows, you'll need to set up a Zapier MCP server for OpenClaw if you haven't already. If you can click, type, and copy-paste, you can set this up in minutes. Just follow these steps:
1. Head to the Zapier MCP dashboard.
2. Click +New MCP Server and choose OpenClaw as the client.
3. Now set up your first action. Click +Add tool.
4. Search for the app you want to connect to, then click its corresponding tile.
5. Select whichever action events you want to connect, then click Connect.
6. Connect your app accounts as needed.
7. In the dashboard, configure each action according to your needs by clicking the kebab menu (â‹®) and then Configure, then adjusting values as needed. Hover over the tooltip icons next to any field for more details. When you're done, click Save.
8. Finally, click Connect at the top of the MCP dashboard and follow the instructions to add this server to your OpenClaw account.
Now you're ready to try the workflows below in OpenClaw.
Pro tip: Want to bake an extra layer of security into your MCP workflows? Try connecting AI Guardrails by Zapier, a built-in tool for detecting PII, toxic language, prompt injection attempts, and negative sentiment in your workflows. Learn how it works in our feature guide.
Turn Slack messages into tracked action items
You're a team lead who ends every day with a Slack channel full of decisions, requests, and follow-ups buried in the noise. You want an agent that can read the last 24 hours of messages, use judgment to distinguish real action items from water-cooler chat, and get them into your project management tool—without you having to triage every thread.
What to prompt OpenClaw
Pull the last 24 hours of messages from the #[1. Channel name] Slack channel, identify any action items or open requests, and create a new task in Asana under the [2. Project name] project for each one. Assign tasks to the person mentioned in the message where possible, and set the due date to three business days from today. Skip any messages that are purely conversational with no action required.
Pull messages from Slack, identify action items, and create assigned tasks in Asana automatically
Qualify and route new leads from your CRM
You're a sales ops manager who wants new leads in HubSpot triaged and routed to the right rep the moment they hit the CRM—without building a rigid rules engine that breaks every time your ICP shifts. You want an agent that can read the record, make a judgment call on fit, and move things forward.
What to prompt OpenClaw
Check HubSpot for any leads created in the last hour. Before scoring, search Glean for our current ICP definition and use whatever criteria you find there to guide your assessment. For each new contact, review their job title, company size, and industry against that ICP, then score them as High, Medium, or Low fit. Add the score as a property on the contact record, assign high-fit leads to the [1. Sales rep name] owner queue in HubSpot, and send a Slack message to #[2. Sales channel name] summarizing each high-fit lead with a link to the record.
Apps to connect: HubSpot, Glean, Slack
Score new HubSpot leads against your ICP, update their records, and route high-fit leads to the right rep
Draft client-ready reports from meeting notes
You're a consultant or account manager who spends too much time after every client call turning raw notes into a polished recap. You want the first draft to exist before you've even closed the meeting tab—formatted, on-brand, and ready to review rather than ready to start.
What to prompt OpenClaw
Pull the most recent meeting note from the [1. Notebook name] notebook in Notion. Draft a client-facing recap email that includes: a summary of what was discussed, a numbered list of decisions made, and next steps with owners and due dates. Keep the tone professional but conversational, no jargon. Save the draft to a new page in the [2. Client folder name] folder in Notion titled "[3. Client name] Recap — [today's date]," then create a draft in Gmail addressed to [4. Client email] with the same content.
Apps to connect: Notion, Gmail
Turn meeting notes into a polished recap email and save it to Notion and Gmail as a draft
Monitor competitor content and log key signals
You're a product marketer or competitive intel person who needs to stay on top of what competitors are shipping—but you also need someone to do the reading and tell you what actually matters. You want the agent to search, form a view on what's worth flagging, and log it, so you're not staring at a raw feed of links.
What to prompt OpenClaw
Search the web for any blog posts, product announcements, or release notes published in the last seven days by [1. Competitor 1], [2. Competitor 2], and [3. Competitor 3]. For each result, write a two-sentence summary of what was announced and why it might matter to us. Add each summary as a new row in the [4. Sheet name] tab of my Google Sheet, with columns for: Competitor, Date, Source URL, and Summary. Flag any announcement related to pricing, new integrations, or enterprise features in the Notes column.
Apps to connect: Google Sheets
Search the web for competitor updates, summarize what matters, and log findings to Google Sheets
Push research summaries from the web into your project tracker
You're a strategist, researcher, or content lead who regularly kicks off projects with a round of desk research—and you want that research to land somewhere useful instead of dying in a browser tab. You want OpenClaw to do the searching, synthesize what it finds, and drop a structured summary directly into your workflow.
What to prompt OpenClaw
Research the current state of [1. Topic or market] using recent web sources from the last 90 days. Identify the top five trends, any notable companies or products gaining traction, and at least two open questions worth investigating further. Write up a structured summary with those three sections, then create a new task in Asana under the [2. Project name] project titled "Research Brief: [1. Topic or market]" and paste the summary into the task description. Set the due date to today and tag it with the [3. Tag name] label.
Apps to connect: Asana
Search the web for market research, synthesize findings, and create a structured brief in Asana
Start building with Zapier MCP
These five workflows are a starting point. Once OpenClaw has live, governed access to your tools through Zapier MCP, you can chain together almost any sequence of research, decision, and action across all of your business-critical apps. And you'll get scoped permissions and OAuth-handled credentials that add a layer of guardrails OpenClaw doesn't give you on its own. If you don't use OpenClaw, you can also connect Zapier MCP to any AI client that supports the Model Context Protocol, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor.
Ready to start building? Head to the Zapier MCP dashboard, or get a step-by-step walkthrough of setting up Zapier MCP in our feature guide.
