The Small-Business Owners Managing Whole Armies of A.I. Employees

Scott Bell is a bankruptcy lawyer who is letting A.I.lobsters take over significant chunks of his daily work.This isn’t surprising if you know a bit about his background.

Bell, a wiry 59-year-old, is a sci-fi nerd from childhood.“‘Star Wars’ got me in ’77,” he says.

When I met him recently in his sunny home office in Temecula, Calif., he handed me a model of an Imperial Star Destroyer that he had fabricated on his 3-D printer, which dominated one corner of the room, across from where his twitchy black Pomeranian and his pug snoozed in doggy beds.Bell has long been an early adopter of office technology.He says he was the first lawyer of his acquaintance to go paperless, back in the early 2000s.

(“Dropbox helped, a lot.”) When bankruptcy software went online, he pounced.When A.I.

chatbots were introduced in the 2020s, he used them for research.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...