Originally published March 23, 2026 by Tony Phung. Updated October 2026.
Lots of people are talking about OpenClaw right now. It’s an open-source AI agent that started life as Clawdbot, was briefly Moltbot, and is now OpenClaw.
It isn’t just a chatbot that answers questions. It can take actions. Depending on how you set it up, it can read and sort email, draft and send messages, manage a calendar, browse the web, work with files and run commands. That’s useful. It’s also why you want to set it up carefully.
Because it’s open source, you can run it on your own hardware, pick the AI model you prefer (a local one through Ollama, or a cloud model), and add “skills” built by the community.
Where it can help a small business
We’ve been trying it with clients in Vancouver, Edmonton and Hong Kong. One example we like is a chat assistant inside Teams or Slack. Your team just asks it questions in plain words, with no new app to learn.
One Hong Kong client keeps their CRM in a SQL database. We connected OpenClaw to a local model, so the processing stays on their own hardware. Staff now type things like “Show me the latest Vancouver deals over $10k” instead of clicking through the old website. Lookups that took minutes can now take seconds.
What to plan before you try it
An agent that can act can also make mistakes, so we set a few ground rules.
- Give it the least access it needs, and nothing more. Read-only first, if you can.
- Keep it away from sensitive data, such as patient or client records, unless you have thought through privacy.
- Ask for human approval before it sends email, changes records or runs commands.
- Remember that an agent reading emails or web pages can be misled by instructions hidden in them, so limit what it can do on its own.
- Keep logs of what it does, and test with sample data before real data.
- Treat community “skills” like any software you install. Check where they came from.
Want to explore it?
If this sounds useful, we’re happy to talk it through. We can look at what’s possible for your business, and how to do it safely. Call (604) 813-7881 for a free consult with Tony. No pressure, no jargon.
