I Built an OpenClaw AI Agent to Do My Job for Me. The Results Were Surprising—and a Little Scary

Can a bot write compelling Fast Company stories? I endeavored to find out.

The hottest AI tool on the market today isn’t a powerful frontier model from the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic.

Rather, it’s a kludgey, wildly complex, open-source platform that’s already provoked a trademark dispute, multiple corporate bans—and fawning praise from developers around the world.

It’s OpenClaw, and it’s specifically designed to build AI agents.

I set it up, built an agent of my own, and promptly trained it to do my job for me. Here’s what happened.

How Canva Became the Power Player in the AI Design Wars

For more than a year now, Big AI companies have promised us an “agentic AI” future. AI wouldn’t simply answer our queries or help us shop for a toaster, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic assured us—it would actually do useful things.

Turns out, the AI giants are generally too squeamish and cost-sensitive to actually release such a tool. Because AI agents can take actions on behalf of a user, they can easily cause harm or make mistakes at scale. 

As we’ll see, they’re also blindingly expensive.

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