OpenClaw, AI Agents, & The Future of Marketing

Agents, agents everywhere. That's all we're going to be hearing for 2026. True. If you aren't already tired of hearing about agents, it's going to be tough for you. For you. Because that's like agents, like we predicted, are going to actually start becoming a real thing in 2026. Now, over the last two weeks, there's been a ton of AI news, but the biggest one of all has been this thing called openclaw, AKA Multbot, AKA claudebot, but officially now known as openclaw. So stay tuned as we talk about what this software means for marketers and if you should start using it. But welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer, where we cover the news and try to contextualize it and help it actually make sense and separate out for the hype, the help from the hype for marketers here on the show. And we call this the Bot Bros segment because, of course, we do a lot of other segments on the show. And I am Dan Sanchez, joined by my actual brother, Travis Sanchez. Hey.

0:05

Hey. Good morning.

1:07

And I'm already starting to feel the struggle, Trav, of just trying to figure out how to even title all these shows because it's like agents, like, the tight working title I have is like open call agents in the future of marketing. I'm like, oh, my gosh, people are just going to start getting title blind agents being in the title. But, like, I don't know what to do. This is what we're going to be talking about all year, so might as well start like, just talking about up front that, like, just get used to hearing about it, I guess, like, try to try to warm you up to the idea that we're just going to be talking about this a lot. Trav. There's been a lot of news about AI over the last couple of weeks and almost all of it's not relevant for marketers. Lots of stuff going on when it comes to code and development and some agent stuff. Um, but the biggest news of all over the last two weeks since we. We. We took a week off last week has been this thing called openclaw that actually kicked off. When it first came out, it was just Claude bot. But of course they got sued by Anthrop or not sued, but, you know, Anthropic reached out. They're like, hey, I know you misspelled it, but you're not going to use Claude. It's as what?

1:09

As like a trademark battle? Like we already have?

2:14

Well, Claude, yeah, because Anthropic owns Claude as far as AI goes. And Claude Bot makes it sound like a product of anthropic. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm like, rookie move, dude. You knew like if this was successful, it was like you were going to get a cease and desist letter.

2:17

Like, might as well call it Gem Bot.

2:33

It's like Google Bot, Gemini Bot. Like you're just gonna get screwed no matter what. You call that like Chat GPT bot? I'm like, yeah, you're gonna get even. If you misspell it, you're gonna get called out. So they changed the name to Maltbot and within two days changed it again because I'm sure they got a cease and desist, another cease and desist because they didn't do proper. So now they're Open Claw. So now you're probably like, okay, well what is this thing and why did it make go viral? Mad to the point where even marketers are asking me now, like, if they should be checking it out. I'm like, so here's, here's what it is and then we'll talk about if you should use it, why it's important, and then like, what to actually do with this information now. So what is it? It is a software program, an open source software program that you can install on your personal computer, maybe a little side computer, maybe your own web server. And it is built in such a way to essentially give the current models freedom, freedom to run, freedom to think, it stores the conversation so it can essentially talk to itself and make decisions in such a way that it's not trying to do everything all in one inference, all within one prompt or one chat.

2:35

Right.

3:50

It's really fascinating. I don't know exactly how the tech works, but essentially it actually took the power of the models and gave it freedom to do things. Wow. Whether it's operating software, applications on your computer, going and doing web searches, even writing code. And that's the important part, because if it can write code and access tools and it can do anything. Let me give you an example of how powerful it is. People set this up and said, hey, I want you to book a reservation for this restaurant that I want to eat at tonight. And so Open Claw goes to work and it's like most people are hooking it up to Claude because Claude's one of the most powerful coding models. So it goes to work, does research, and it's looking for, you know, like a place where it can book, book a reservation for its client. Right. And finds there is no. The only way to book a reservation is to Make a phone call. It's like, well, crap, I don't have the. I don't have the ability to call and I don't have any voice ability. Okay, let me figure out if I can actually figure it out. And it went and found 11 labs signed up for an account there. Actually got voice integrated, coded its own app to make the phone call, got a phone number, actually figured it out how to actually make the phone call with the voice to book the reservation successfully. I'm like, frick.

3:50

Wow.

5:10

I've had personal assistants that get stuck by a wall and then can't move forward without you kind of troubleshoot it for them. You know, it's going farther. There's even people launching websites called Rent a Human, I think it's called. Because there's things, of course, that like you. Of course it figured out the phone thing. But, like, there's things like. Like what if it wants to drop off some flowers? Well, there's now a marketplace where agents specifically can go and pay, like gig workers to go and do things in the real world. You know, if you want to pick something up or move something or hold a sign in the airport that says, I was hired to stand here with this sign by AI agents. You know, real story. So that agents actually have the ability to tap into the real world through humans. You know, if they have access to a bank account with a limited amount of money, they can actually go and make purchases and do things. And it is really good. Like, this is the kind of stuff that we're like, oh, someday we'll get to this. This is that. This is that.

5:10

Are we there? So you're basically letting me know that cross tab work has been created through this.

6:10

Yeah.

6:18

Claudex. What did you call it?

6:19

I don't. Open Claw is the official thing now. Formerly Claude Bot slash Mole Bottom. Um, it's now Open claw. So.

6:21

Aw, Open claw? Like literally like a claw?

6:31

Yeah, like a lobster claw. C L, A W open.

6:34

I was thinking like a lion claw, but it's fine. Raptor claw.

6:37

No, it's. It's. It's mascot has been a lobster the whole time, so. Oh, it was even Claude, but misspelled Claude with like a W instead of a U. Like you've been clawed. Yeah, it's. They've had the lobster thing going for a while. Or molt. Lobster molts. Yeah. So this thing's powerful. There's one massive problem with this thing. It is a security vulnerability. Nightmare. All the things that cybersecurity people have put in place over the last 15 to 20 years have to essentially be turned off for this thing to have the autonomy to do what it does. And unless you really know what you're doing, you're essentially leaving your systems wide open. So that's why people, like some people are getting brave enough to stall it on your computer. But this thing has agency, it can do things. You don't want to install it on your computer cuz like it's gonna have access to everything you have access to. So people, there's been a run on Mac Minis to install it on a Mac Mini and then it can operate from there. Like you're hiring an employee called OpenClaw and it's like running from the Mac Mini or installing it on a server where it has limited access. But the thing I've come to the conclusion I'm like it's so risky to run this thing right now that I don't recommend it to anybody unless you actually know what you're doing. And even then you think about it as experimental. If you already know what you're doing, you probably already know about this. If you're running it right now, you are gambling. It's funny, it's everybody. A lot of people talk about it, but not nearly as much as they talked about the security risk of like Chat GPT's Atlas browser which was much more minimal compared to what this is.

6:41

You know what's crazy, this sounds like things a thing of sci fi. But then I literally just put it into Gemini Clawbot or Open Claw. Now I'm confused because all the three names which it mentioned here, but it says all of these things automated life. One user famously Let bot delete 75 old. 75,000 old emails while they were in the shower. One of them negotiated for a car to get $4,000 off what he could do There is the human for hire. I'm like, is that real? Yes it is. Emerged this week allowing Open Claw agents to actually hire human freelancer.

8:30

Yeah, yeah, this is real. It is happening. There are 89 or 90,000 GitHub like upvotes on this thing where you can go and get the code. And that's, that's like the ratings let alone people have downloaded it.

9:06

You were just talking about this. But it's first thing before it got that to notable use cases from the wild. It was like massive security chaos. It is, yes. This is.

9:22

People are getting hacked right and left.

9:32

Sketchy and right and left.

9:34

People are getting hacked. Bank accounts are being left open. If you're dealing with Crypto People's like, phrases are getting left out. People are getting hacked right and left. It is a cybersecurity feast. Or it's like, it's, it's a, it's a hacker feast right now because there's so many open protocols to people's secure personal information.

9:36

Yikes.

9:56

So, but, but. So while I'm definitely recommending don't do this, it's so big and so popular that every AI company is taking hard notes right now, right? So what most people are talking about is like, okay, like, don't do this now. But like, this is definitely an indicator of where things are going. And it won't take long because they're Google and OpenAI and anthropic and all these people are like, going to figure out how to make this secure or more secure at least, you know, and.

9:57

Some of you might be thinking, gosh, am I really keeping up with all of this? I talked to a manager yesterday who said, how do I start an email? Like, just if I'm not replying to one, how do I, like, if I wanted to start the email chain, how do I do that? So if you feel behind, you're not in a lot of cases. Know what I mean? So don't worry.

10:34

That's. Yeah, yeah, that guy's on the, the end of the adoption curve cycle, you know what I'm saying? He's like the laggard at the very tail end. Like the 1% of like, people who haven't caught on yet. Yeah, we are still in early days with this thing. Like, of course, last year I'd called out at the beginning of the year and then it happened definitely by the end of the year that like, the majority, the majority of early, early stage mark, early marketers, like, we'll probably hit 40, 50% of marketers actually using AI in a meaningful way in like a weekly basis. We've crossed that mile. There's still a ton of marketers that leaves like half that hardly use it at all to kind of give you an idea. So, like, we're still early of half marketers. It's kind of be like, remember the days of social media and people weren't posting on social. There were still a lot of companies without social media. It was like 2016 and there were still like pretty large companies without social pages.

11:03

Still a lot of companies without social pages.

12:01

So we're kind of in the early days still of AI, but it's picking up fast now and it's becoming more sophisticated. I think this is a really good. Like, my call of, like, predicting that we're going to have cross tab work that's reliable and secure and fast by.

12:05

The end of the year.

12:23

By the end of the year. Definitely coming. It may be sooner. We'll see. These security things are pretty big and pretty hard to deal with. The prompt injection problem we talked about in past episodes, that's a massive problem because someone can hijack this whole thing easily and that's how they, that's how they get it. They. No one's figured out that problem yet, but they will. They also couldn't figure out reasoning until they did. So it's like, well, we will figure this out. So what do you do in the meantime? There's this big thing building. I'm saying don't do it. Like, go and like, learn about it, sure. But like, don't actually take advantage of it yet. There's a lot of people getting all kinds of FOMO and click, clickbait saying, like, if you're not doing this now, you're falling behind. BS, BS. Go build custom GPTs. Go use deep research. Go use the image models a lot. Like, go do those things. You won't. You're not falling ahead. Go do the things that are tried and true and that most people still don't use. Like, most mo. Like, I think like over 90% of ChatGPT users never switch to the reasoning model. To give you an idea of, like, how much people haven't really done a lot yet with even the basic tools, we've had reasoning models for over a year now, a year and a half almost. And that's kind of a big deal. So what do you do in the meantime with all this? And I was sitting here like before the show, I was thinking, I'm like, what can people possibly do to prepare? Here's the thing, the new bottleneck is not going to be how well you use AI necessarily. It's going to be how well you can actually orchestrate what you even want to have happen. It's almost like having a team, a professional. In a couple years, it'll be like you have a team of 20 very capable marketers and they're all sitting there with their fingers out, hovering over their laptops, being like, what do you want us to do? Say the word. But until you say the word, they do nothing. This is what it's going to be like. And a lot of junior marketers, mid level marketing managers especially, what do you want them to do? Your ability to tell them what to do and how to do it is everything. I have a lot of friends that work at Dave Ramsey right now. This is happening in develop development right now. And of course we've talked about like the fact that developer jobs are getting crushed and Dave Ramsey is actually pushing AI pretty heavily. They're, they're quite ahead as far as how well their company uses AI. If you go to daveramsey.com, they actually have a search engine or a chatbot that's like programmed with all the Dave stuff. It's the Dave bot. It's very good. If you want to see what a custom AI solution looks like that's open for everybody to use, but then plugs products in the conversation and in a really nice and natural way go to daveramsey.com and just like ask a financial question. It'll come up. It's very cool. I think we'll see a lot more of that in the future. It's like a fine tuned model that's exciting. But they have developers that are moving from developer to product manager because the question isn't how fast can we get it done, it's what do we even want now? Things that used to take six months now take two weeks. Things that used to take two weeks take a couple hours. So then the bottleneck becomes what do we want to have happen here? So marketers, you have to learn like I don't like if you don't know a lot about marketing, know how to orchestrate all of them and how all the channels work together. I, I think you're in trouble. The fastest way I know how to learn how to do this all is to start like build a personal brand called you.com like by your name dot com. Try to grow on social and start making content and become about something. Doesn't really matter what it is either. But your goal is to build an audience and make get people to sign up for a newsletter. Like if you just do those two things and start thinking about marketing this and coming up with content worth subscribing to, it doesn't matter what it is. It could be you making albums on Suno Music for whatever the heck you want or a newsletter about poetry. It doesn't matter what it is, but make your own little mini brand and market it and have a safe place outside of your employer to experiment with all these AI tools in really aggressive ways. And that's the only way I can think of putting in the reps that's going to prepare you to be able to better orchestrate AI later. Smart. That's my best advice. What do you think?

12:24

You know, I've heard that saying, or at least I've seen it on social media where this guy was like, listen, if I could give you a lottery ticket every single day and the numbers are pulled every single day, you'd probably take it, right? Well, every time you don't post, at least one post on social media, that could be your lottery ticket and you can discover what voice people want to listen to or the product that you're offering or your self could be putting yourself out there, you're just not marketing yourself by putting one piece of content out there every single day to see what lands, what sticks, what resonates. And it could literally like set your life on a different trajectory, let alone the skills that you'll gain and garnish from doing it yourself and actually building your repertoire of abilities, whether it's using AI or video editing, whatever. Well, now you can't do anything. Like you shouldn't do anything on social media without getting reps in using AI to complete whatever you're doing. So I love social.

16:40

It's such a good feedback mechanism.

17:47

Oh yeah.

17:49

The thing I love about the analogy but that's missing is that every single time you do it, the odds get slightly better in your favor.

17:50

Like, yep, that number was close, but you can get closer. Yeah.

17:57

Every single time you go, you do it and you learn a little bit and you learn over time. After posting over and over again, your odds of hitting it go up.

18:00

Right.

18:08

You just have to keep going.

18:09

Right.

18:10

And it's just nuts. But if you continue to use AI and use, use like again, have something that you're trying to get people's attention with, it could be a free thing, shoot, set up a little paid thing. Shoot. Do a little freelance on the side and have, have a page worth like gumroad and have like a product you sell or a service you sell or something. Not hard to set these things up. Have Chat GPT explain it what you should do. Shoot. Just ask ChatGPT. Hey, based on all our conversations, I want to start building a little personal brand and learn how to use AI better. But I want to use it around something practical that I can actually sell. Based on everything you know about me, what should that be?

18:11

It's good.

18:45

It's going to tell you.

18:46

It's going to tell you for sure. It's like the viral caricature caricature that people are posting all over the place. Like what if, if I was a caricature, like what do I look like, and then it's, it's putting the person in the image and then putting all of these. Have you seen this? This is like the viral thing right now. No, because everyone's talking with ChatGPT, so it kind of knows you and you say, well, just what, what would I look like? And it puts, you know, everything important to that person in the image. So it's like whether it's traveling or a bible or their student or whatever.

18:47

It puts it all kind of cool. It's kind of like the toy, the action figure toy trend from like, except.

19:16

It'S way more detailed. So you don't think it's going to spit out some information about what your content should be about because it knows what you're interested in. What gets you. What gets you up in the morning?

19:22

Yeah, it gives me a picture and it's got like a therapist in the background. It's like, yeah, don't know. But curiosities. That's why I could see why that's going viral right now. So that's open claw. It's a good picture of what's coming when it actually becomes secure. So worth checking out. Watching some YouTube videos about it, how it works, some case studies. Don't download it, don't use it, it's not ready. But you need to start preparing the soft skills and the reps so that when it is ready, you can orchestrate that team quickly and mobilize it fast. So that's kind of the big news. The one little tiny piece of news, which is kind of interesting still to wrap up this section, is that Gemini has reached 750 million active users. It wasn't long ago that ChatGPT had reached 800 million active users. So ChatGPT is still ahead, but Gemini is growing substantially and I'm using it all the time. I used to say, like this time last year, I'm like, just pick one and commit. I'm using all three pretty regularly now. I'm still using Chat GPT the most, but Gemini next. And then I have a cloud account. I'm using that fairly regularly now too. I'm not using X X AI at all right now. Where are you at you mostly just chatgpt still.

19:33

I don't know what triggers my brain to go to one or the other, but there is definitely some system in my mind where there's something I want to use AI for. And I'll. I know exactly, I'm going to chat and then all of a sudden I'm like, there's something else different. And I go, oh, I'm going to Gemini. I don't really understand why I do it, but it might just be laziness. I just flip between both and decide.

20:55

I find I'm picking one or the other.

21:21

I do. I still use.

21:23

I can't always define why, but sometimes I do. Well, let's move on to the sponsor of the week. And this one's fun, guys. This High level. Take a seat. Next week we'll come back to high level. But this week it is the AI Business World. It's a conference that's coming UP in Anaheim, California on April 28th through the 30th this year. And it's actually part or I'd say, like, it's like a site, it's a side conference that's happening at the same time as social media Marketing world. So these conferences are happening right next to each other. Like, one's on the top floor, one's on the bottom floor. You can do both or one. But I'm going to be there because I'm speaking there as one of the. One of the speakers. I'm going to be speaking on 15/AI tools you can easily implement to transform your marketing. And I'm excited to be there. If you'd love to meet and you want to come to a business conference that's all about AI is highly practical. I want to tell you about how you can get a free ticket. Yes, they're actually sponsoring this episode so that we can actually get this out to the audience. And I was like, yes, this is amazing. So say thank you to Michael Stelzner because he's the one who, who told me, told me about this when he was a guest on the show just a few weeks ago. So in order to qualify for this contest, you only need to do two things. You need to leave a review for this show. AI Driven Marketer on Apple or Spotify. Not just the stars, but, like, tell us how you feel. Shoot, it could even be negative. But tell us how you really feel about the podcast. Has it helped you? Has it hurt you? Has it been good? Has it been bad? As long as it's genuine. Leave a review. It could be on Apple or Spotify, either one. But when you leave it, take a screenshot and then go to aidrivenmarketer.com contest and prove that you did. And you will be in the running to win a free ticket to the AI Business World. So I would love to see you there in Anaheim. Of course, if you. If, even if you don't Win. You should consider coming because again, there's a lot of AI conferences popping up. But I tell you what, like the Social Media examiner crew, they know how to put on a freaking good conference. I've been to lots of conferences and this one, I'm like, yeah, these. These guys have been honing this in for over a decade now. They know how to put on a good conference where you're not only going to get top tier speakers who give very tactical advice, but one of the things I loved about it is that everybody in this conference, for some reason, like, wants to talk, wants to network, wants to actually, like, share their best stuff. So every time you sit at a table, the conversations you get are through are just some of the best things I've ever had. So come see me. I'll be there. In Anaheim this April 28th through 30th. A business world. Moving on to our everyday AI segment. I got some stuff. You got something to share this week, Trav?

21:24

So I use Planning Center a lot in my day to day.

24:21

Yeah.

24:25

And it's a CRM, it's a scheduler, it's a calendar. It's all these things.

24:26

Right.

24:30

Well, I'm going to move away from just what I've used Gemini or ChatGPT for and insert something that I thought was so interesting. They have a list function, which a lot of CRMs do, where you're needing to pull a certain list. I need to know everybody who has donated in the last two months and isn't a mail because I'm sending an email out to. I don't. Whatever you want to pull a specific list. They have an AI tool built in now where you just. And I'll say when you're building the list, you have to go, I want to include this group and from this time period in this app, whatever, who has been to an event. Well, now they have an AI tool where you just type in what you want and it builds. It builds the list finder for you.

24:31

So nice.

25:18

Yeah, so nice. And I was like, wow. And it actually worked.

25:19

We're finally getting beyond the. Do you want to make this sound friendlier? AI tools.

25:24

Correct. I'm like, wow, they're really into the app itself. It's integrating from simple prompt to useful. I guess you would call it, like, list. Well, I don't even know what you'd call it.

25:29

It's essentially an agent or it's not an agent. It's an AI tool that can build reports. Yep. From a simple prompt, your common language without you having to have the skill of knowing how to get it correct, which is hard to learn sometimes based on these query string things and hard to remember unless you're doing it all the time, which how many of us are in planning center doing that kind of stuff? Nobody. Unless you're like nobody. Because no one can afford that person even on a church staff. So.

25:44

So just that integration this week, I thought, okay. And you know, I was waiting for a hallucination. You know, I was waiting for it to go. No, but first try it did it. I was like, whoa, this is rare. We all seen the new AI product and it always hallucinates. Not with this one. I was so I was pleasantly surprised.

26:08

I. I've been working with a company that I've worked with before and I needed to do get a catch up on just like what's their audience talking about right now? So I did some market research. The last time I did market research for this company was in August and September of 2000 2024. So it's been about a year and a half. This is before reasoning models. This is just before deep research came around. And so this time I, and I did so I did all the research manually. Like I had to go and pull all the reviews, I had to go and pull the information out of the founder, all the best information out of the founders and interview them and pull their things. Like, okay, what is this company known for? What's the audience about? What are the problems? I had to go and do surveys and ask the audience like, what are, what are your things? And I did the research and I came up with some pretty good research insights. It was good this time. I just ran some deep research reports on the audience. Like, hey, like what are the frequent pain points of this audience? Go and search Reddit and Quora and social sites and forums, anywhere where this particular audience shows up and then go and organize it and have a specific prompt library just for deep audience research. And I had it do that. I had to go and find what the audience like really loves about the brand, what they don't like about the brand. So I ran all these different reports, reports. Oh my gosh. These deep research reports are better than what I did manually and got paid to do just a year and a half ago. Wow. And I did properly, I did it well. It was a good job. It helped and I made content. It was good. AI was much better.

26:29

Wow.

28:00

And because I had the same stuff that I'd done manually right next to it, I could qualify it and understand like, is this good? Yes, it was good. It was way better. Deep research for audience insights is like severely underutilized. It is so freaking good. Key tip. Go and ask it for all the things your, your, the audience hates about your biggest competitor. And just go mine all that data and then ask it, like, how can I use this information that the audience hates about my biggest competitor and put it into my marketing plan to like, hit them with it. It'll be good. Just hope your competitor doesn't do it for you before you do.

28:01

My other one's pretty simple. I just had a. I actually got a company car. Someone from the organization I work for, I work for a church and they gave me a car that they leased for somebody else, but they left. So like, hey, do you want this? And I was like, sure. So they're like, we'll forward you the lease agreement. So I'm like, I don't want to read this 34 page PDF. So I just threw it into chat and just asked the, you know, the questions. Very helpful. I'm like, oh, okay. I don't, I don't. I've never leased a car. I don't know how it works. So being able to have a huge document where I just need a couple questions answered and then if I ever need to go back to it, I can go, hey, what's this? What?

28:43

What?

29:22

How does this work? And it lets me know. Simple.

29:23

Something I've been doing more and more now that I have a book published, is using the book to come up with everything I need related to the book. Need a press release for the book done. Because you can just upload the book and it has all the context it needs to know. You don't have to explain anything like, here's the book document. It is so powerful. Need a press release done. Content on a specific chapter, done. Pitch done. Doesn't matter what it is. If you need an event based on the book, here's the outline. Is it going to be good? Yes. Because it has all the context that 60,000 words of context, especially when you're doing that with Gemini, it is crushing it. Wow. I'm like, man, books are undervalued right now. Like, just having a book of your method and your thinking is such a shortcut to learning how to use AI. Because then it's just taking from what you said and repurposing it the way you need it to be. It's. It's tough to come up with one. But I'm working on it and we'll probably be teaching more people how to use how to go from podcast to book because I think it's one of the best methods to use unless you're really strong at writing. If you're a great writer, write the book. If you're not a great writer and you struggle to sit down and knock out 30,000 words, speaking it through a podcast is the coolest thing. So no poll this week, but I do have one post I want to share. It's actually not a viral post. It's a YouTube video from a guy named Nate Jones, and I wanted to finish off with this because I'm highly I'm going to recommend if you're interested in this Open Claw thing, go check out this video from Nate Jones. It'll be linked in the show notes, of course, but essentially the title of the video is OpenAI Slowly slowing hiring anthropics engineers. Stop writing code, and here's why you should care. But it's essentially a video about OpenClaw and the impacts of it. If you want to understand it. Explained in a way at least it made sense to me. It gave me a better piece of context for why this new OpenClaw agent thing is kind of a big deal, why you shouldn't use it, and how it's a good marker for what's to come. He elaborates on it more so if you want to dig into it, I thought that this particular video was really good at breaking it down. So after you finish this episode, go and check it out.

29:26