A Step-by-Step Guide to Deploying Your First Generalist AI Agent

💡 Want us to set this up for you? If you'd rather skip the technical setup and have a fully configured AI agent running for your business, we can do it for you end-to-end. Book a call with Greenmint Labs →

The Big Picture

Think of OpenClaw not as a tool, but as a new hire. Like any employee, it needs:

• A machine to work on (VPS)
• A phone number (Telegram)
• A work email (Gmail or similar)
• Access to your communication stack (Teams)
• A workspace to manage its own tasks and knowledge (Notion)

Once all of these are connected, your agent — let's call her Sophie — can receive tasks, execute them, track her own work in Notion, and report back, all autonomously.

All of Sophie's configuration lives in a single file: ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json. Every integration you set up in this guide gets added to that one file.

Step 1: Setting Up Your VPS & Installing OpenClaw

Sophie's VPS is her office. It runs 24/7, independently of your personal machine.

Choosing a VPS Provider

Any of these work well:

• DigitalOcean (simplest for beginners — $6/mo droplet)
• Hetzner (most cost-efficient for Europe/India)