AI Agents Like OpenClaw Are Here. How Can You Use Them?
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Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, March 29th. I'm Alex Ocele for The Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world. On today's show, agentic AI is the buzziest word in tech right now. AI agents are taking on tasks like tracking customer orders and making restaurant reservations. And the next generation promises to be even more powerful, becoming kind of like a personal assistant. But AI agents also come with big risks, even as they may stand to finally help tech companies make money off artificial intelligence.
Journal tech reporter Isabel Bousquet joins me to discuss. Isabel, when developers or companies refer to an AI agent or AI assistant, what do they mean? Like, what is that?
This is a very overhyped, overused term, and I don't think the industry has a common definition. But at its base, an agent is an AI that can do something for you. It becomes agentic when you say agent. make this restaurant reservation for me, book this doctor's appointment for me, book this flight for me, buy this dress for me. Anything where it's going out into the world and executing some behavior on your behalf, that's the point at which it becomes an agent.
When companies talk about using AI agents, how are they using them?
We're seeing two kind of big categories emerge so far.
What are AI agents and how are they currently being used?
One is in the coding space. There are a million companies that offer this from the Cloud Code and OpenAI Codex of the world to Cursor, Replit, Lovable. Everyone has an AI coding agent these days. Engineers are using this a lot. The other area we've started to see agents take off is in customer service. It kind of grows out of the traditional phone tree technology that was not really AI-enabled at all. But now it can be. If a customer calls with a question about where their order is, an AI agent can handle that call and give status updates or replace a missing loyalty card or things like that.
How do these tools actually help companies make money?
We know companies are spending a lot of money to use them. If we take engineering, this is the example a lot of people use because it's just the most mature use case by far. So every time a coder uses an agent, it costs money. It costs what they call tokens. And some companies give their engineers a certain allotted number of tokens. And some companies are more flexible, saying have as many tokens as you want. But some companies compare the salary of the engineer to the amount of tokens they're using. And they're saying that in a lot of cases, this person is costing more in tokens than they are an actual salary. But on the flip side of that, they're also looking at the amount of work this person is doing.
And they're saying this person is being like 10 times or 50 times more productive than they would if they didn't have a coding agent. So although they're costing two times an engineer salary, they're delivering like 10x of what an engineer can do. So that's how they're weighing the returns at this point.
The kinds of agents we've been talking about are out there in the world, but there's something else that's coming, right? And it's something called OpenClaw.
Yeah. So OpenClaw is an open source orchestration framework. For it to be a true personal assistant, you have to give it access to everything, which is a huge security concern because there have been instances where it goes and deletes a bunch of your files or deletes a bunch of your emails or It could get your credit card into a fraud situation. It's very insecure, but the potential is massive for you to just connect it to everything in your system and all of your logins and all of your data. And then these agents, they're doing all these complicated things. You can set it to do a task and then walk away. It's just become this whole other level in terms of what agents are capable of doing.
OpenClaw was acquired by OpenAI last month, but other companies are getting on board with what agents like OpenClaw can do.
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