Here’s a gift article from the Times about how small business owners are using AI, often successfully, to power their business and/or automate many processes, including customer interaction, research, and more.

nytimes.com - AI agents openclaw small business

The Small-Business Owners Managing Whole Armies of A.I. Employees
When you turn A.I. agents loose on your finances, email and customers, what could possibly go wrong?

This January, he started reading on Reddit about OpenClaw. It’s software that you can install on your computer or in the cloud, and it spawns A.I. “agents” that do work for you. If you give OpenClaw access to your folders and files, it can read and add to them; give it the passwords to online services you use, and it will log in and use them on your behalf. If you explain to the agents how to do your white-collar office work — either by typing out step-by-step instructions or just by chatting with them — they can then begin trying to do the work for you.

OpenClaw agents don’t do this “thinking” themselves. They constantly send requests to a large language model chosen by the user, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Codex or Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude Opus, and accomplish their tasks based on the L.L.M.’s answers. The agents will also keep track of what they’ve learned about your workflows, so users have often found that the agents grow more knowledgeable over time. The Reddit forums were full of people gushing about how they had gotten OpenClaw to respond to their emails, track expenses, do research, chat with clients. The OpenClaw logo is a lobster, so many Reddit users affectionately refer to their agents as “lobsters.”

I can’t find a paragraph or two that’s representative enough (or perhaps I just didn’t try hard enough) but by the time I finished the article I felt I had a reasonably balanced view of the phenomenon, at least enough to overcome to snark in the headline and the multiple anecdotal examples given throughout.

I have to say I am happy I am at the age I am and don’t really have to deal with any of this but it’s helpful to understand what this is and where it’s going, perhaps in the same way as learning about the Internet in 1993 would have been.

Long article. Pretty good at bringing it to layman’s understanding, I think.