Your assistant inside the workspace — read channels, search history, post messages and tame the noise.
Slack is where decisions get made and then immediately buried. The Slack MCP server gives your assistant a line into the workspace — listing channels, reading history, posting messages, replying in threads and reacting — which turns "scroll back through three weeks of #engineering" into a question you can just ask.
Summarisation is the headline act. "What happened in #incidents this week?" produces a digest with the noise stripped out; "what did we decide about the pricing change?" pulls the relevant exchange from a channel you'd have skimmed past. For anyone returning from leave to four-digit unread counts, this alone justifies the setup. Posting works too — the assistant can draft an update in context and, with your approval, deliver it to the right channel or thread.
Setup goes through a Slack app: create one at api.slack.com, grant bot-token scopes (channels:read, channels:history, chat:write and friends), install it to the workspace and copy the xoxb- token into the server config. Ten minutes, mildly bureaucratic, entirely one-time. Note that the bot sees only channels it's been invited to — a natural scoping mechanism worth using deliberately rather than inviting it everywhere.
The original Anthropic reference implementation is archived but functional; community successors (korotovsky's slack-mcp-server notably) extend it with search modes, DM support and Enterprise workarounds. For most teams the reference server's read-summarise-post loop covers the daily value: fewer tabs, fewer scrollbacks, decisions surfaced instead of excavated.
channels:history only covers public channels. Private channels need groups:history plus an explicit invite, and DMs need im:history — miss a scope and the tool returns an empty result rather than a permissions error, which looks identical to a quiet channel.SLACK_CHANNEL_IDS as an allowlist even when the bot lives in only a handful of places. It keeps the channel listing small, which measurably reduces the assistant's tendency to wander.Condense a week of a busy channel into the five things that mattered.
Find where something was agreed and quote the actual exchange.
Compose status updates in context and post them after your approval.
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| slack_list_channels | List channels the bot can see |
| slack_get_channel_history | Read recent messages from a channel |
| slack_post_message | Post a message to a channel |
| slack_reply_to_thread | Reply within a thread |
| slack_add_reaction | React to a message with an emoji |
| slack_get_thread_replies | Read a full thread |
| slack_get_users / slack_get_user_profile | Look up workspace members |
{
"mcpServers": {
"slack": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-slack"],
"env": {
"SLACK_BOT_TOKEN": "xoxb-your-bot-token",
"SLACK_TEAM_ID": "T01234567"
}
}
}
}Create a Slack app with bot scopes (channels:read, channels:history, chat:write, reactions:write, users:read), install to workspace, copy the bot token.
A Slack app with bot-token scopes installed to your workspace. The bot only sees channels it's invited to.
| Variable | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| SLACK_BOT_TOKEN | Bot user OAuth token from your Slack appe.g. xoxb-... | Yes |
| SLACK_TEAM_ID | Workspace/team IDe.g. T01234567 | Yes |
| SLACK_CHANNEL_IDS | Optional comma-separated channel allowlist | Optional |
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