Beginner guide

OpenClaw Tutorial: Your First AI Team in 5 Minutes

This tutorial walks you from zero to a fully functional AI agent team — no prior experience with AI agents, Docker, or servers required.

1

Meet your agents in the Agent view

After setup, open the Agents tab. You'll see each agent as a card with their role, current status, XP level, and active skills. Click any agent to inspect their system prompt, memory, and assigned tools. You can add or remove skills without touching any code.

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Agents3 active
Roster
🔍
Novaworking
Researcher Agent
2,400 / 3,000 XPLVL 12
Scanning market trends...68%

Nova is your dedicated research specialist. She scours the web, synthesizes findings from dozens of sources, and delivers structured reports — so you always have the intelligence you need to make decisions fast.

Attributes
Focus88
Speed72
Accuracy91
Memory65
Skills
Web ResearchData SynthesisTrend AnalysisSummarization
MCP Servers
Brave Searchon
Firecrawlon
Exa Searchon
System Prompt
You are Nova, a research specialist. Search the web for accurate, up-to-date information and synthesize findings into clear, structured reports.
Memory
3 items
01Market trends report synthesized from 47 sources
02TechCrunch.com scan: 12 articles indexed
03AI startup funding data extracted from Crunchbase
2

Give your first task on the Tasks Board

Open the Tasks tab. Create a new task: type what you want done, assign it to an agent, and set a priority. The agent picks it up in seconds. You can watch its progress in the In Progress column, and see the result move to Done when it finishes.

Tasks Board8 tasks
2 active
In Progress
2
🔍Nova
high

Scanning market trends

2/3 steps67%
Search web sources
Extract key data
Synthesize report
Research
💻Rex
medium

Writing unit tests

1/3 steps33%
Define test cases
Write assertions
Run & verify
Dev
Planned
2
✍️Aria
medium

Drafting blog post

Writing
📊Leo
medium

Analyzing Q2 metrics

Analytics
Recurring
2
🧠Atlas
low

Index new documents

every 10 min
Memory
🔌Orion
low

Sync calendar events

every 1 hour
Tools
Blocked
0

Empty

Done
2
✍️Aria
medium

SEO optimization

Keyword research
Update meta tags
Rewrite copy
Writing
🔍Nova
medium

Crawling competitor sites

Identify targets
Scrape content
Compare findings
Research
3

Track everything on the Dashboard

The Dashboard shows you live KPIs: tasks completed, tokens used, cost to date, and which agents are active. The Activity Heatmap shows you when your team was busiest. Use the 1d / 7d / 30d toggle to review trends.

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Dashboard
just now
Tasks Done
312
+48 vs prev week
Tokens Used
16.8M
↑ 8%
💰Cost
$127.40
on track
🎯Success Rate
96.1%
↑ 2.1% vs prev
Avg Latency
1.6s
P95: 3.8s
🤖Active Agents
6 / 6
Nova, Rex, Atlas, Orion
Activity Timeline
47240MonWedThuSatSun
Task Outcomes (7d)
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
Done
Failed
Blocked
Activity Heatmap
MonTueWedThuFriSatSun
0h6h12h18h22h
Less
More
Agent Utilization
Nova 🔍
98
Rex 💻
77
Atlas 🧠
63
Orion 🔌
49
Aria ✍️
28
Leo 📊
14
Latency (seconds)
Nova
1.2s
Rex
2.1s
Atlas
0.8s
Orion
0.4s
Aria
3.2s
Leo
4.1s
P50
P95
P99
Token Breakdown
16.8M
total tokens
Nova31%
Rex26%
Atlas20%
Orion14%
Aria6%
Leo3%
Live Events
09:14🔍Found 3 relevant trend reports
09:13🧠Stored 847 context tokens
09:12💻test_auth.py: 5/5 passing
09:11🔌Webhook fired: POST /api/notify
09:08🔍Crawled 12 pages on techcrunch.com
09:06🧠Retrieved session context #A12
09:05💻Opened PR #42: add unit tests

Everything you need, built in

Assign tasks

Type what you need, assign to any agent

Watch live

See agents work in the Office View in real time

Chat directly

Open a direct chat with any agent at any time

Upload files

Agents read your PDFs, CSVs, and docs automatically

Telegram alerts

Agents send you updates to your Telegram or Slack

What you'll learn in this tutorial

OpenClaw is a platform for running a team of specialized AI agents. Each agent has a role — one researches, one writes code, one manages data — and they all work together inside a shared workspace.

In this tutorial you'll launch your first agent team, understand the dashboard, assign your first task, and see agents complete real work. The whole process takes under 10 minutes on your first run.

Frequently asked questions

OpenClaw is a managed platform that runs a team of specialized AI agents for you. Each agent has a defined role (researcher, developer, writer, analyst) and comes with pre-configured tools. You interact with them through a web dashboard — no code required.
Go to open-claw-setup.com, choose a plan, select your agents, and click Launch. You'll have a live dashboard in under 60 seconds. Then add your Anthropic API key in Settings and assign your first task.
No. OpenClaw is designed for non-developers. The entire interface is point-and-click. Agents are pre-configured — you just tell them what to do in plain English.
Common beginner use cases: researching topics and getting summaries, drafting content or emails, analyzing spreadsheet data, monitoring websites for changes, and automating repetitive information-gathering tasks.
ChatGPT is a single chat interface with one model. OpenClaw gives you a team of specialized agents that can run tasks in parallel, remember context across sessions, use tools (web search, file reading, code execution), and report results to Telegram or Slack automatically.