How to Experiment Safely With OpenClaw Without Risking Your Company’s Data

A recent Miami OpenClaw event with a 500-person waitlist revealed how eager business leaders are to deploy OpenClaw. How ready are you?

Illustration: Inc; Photo: Getty Images

On a Tuesday night in late February, roughly 200 people gathered at The Lab Miami to learn more about OpenClaw, a months-old platform that allows its users to build and locally run their personalized AI assistants directly on their own computers, a different approach to other cloud-based tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

The event was hosted by Gianni D’Alerta, co-founder of Purple Horizons and long-time convener within the Miami tech scene. After learning about OpenClaw, testing it, and seeing the appetite for it, D’Alerta and his business partner reached out to the Lab to host a free OpenClaw workshop, teaming up with Miami Hack Week founder Ja’dan Johnson—who has been convening the Miami hacker scene for almost five years—for additional technical support. 

While the hosts grappled with how to manage 200 people across two rooms, an additional 500 people remained on the waitlist, a strong indicator that interest in this niche tool goes beyond the technical community. 

D’Alerta believes that this OpenClaw event caught fire due to hosts’ longstanding, curated community and gap in the community when it comes to showcasing work. 

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“Miami has a lack of developer demo day type events where people can stand up and share something interesting they’ve done or built,” explains D’Alerta, an indication that people are drawn to spaces where they can share and learn with no agenda. 

Of the people in attendance, there was an even split between developers/tinkerers and business leaders. “ Most people are using some form of AI now,” says D’Alerta. “They think it’s just plug[ging] it in or [installing] software, and it’s ready to go.” However, D’Alerta explains this is not the case, which became apparent during the event. 

Unlike ChatGPT and Claude that are intuitive AI-powered chatbots, OpenClaw is more than that. Think of it as a framework where a user may use tools and skills to custom build an agent or representative that continuously operates and executes tasks on their behalf. Some of these tools include integrations that connect with consumer apps like Gmail, Slack, and Apple Calendar. In other words, OpenClaw is an entire system that can leverage these tools and integrations to work on a user’s behalf rather than simply functioning as a question and answer chatbot.

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