Agentic AI Is Going Mainstream — And It’s Changing Everything
G’day Rankers, welcome back. A lot has happened this week, so let’s get into it.
The Agentic Framework Wave Is Here
It wasn’t that long ago — a couple of weeks, really — that I said every business needs an agentic framework. I’ve been saying it because it’s been absolutely amazing for us, both personally and in the business. Having Jan sitting there, ready to take on tasks and get things done, has been a game changer. And now it seems like everyone is following suit.
The conversation has exploded around what OpenClaw has put out in the open — a massive can of worms that really highlights the value of having an agentic framework sitting locally inside your business.
My Setup: Hermes from Nous Research
You might remember that I tried OpenClaw a while back and thought it was a little bit too dangerous for me to be playing with too heavily. Since then, I’ve switched to Hermes from Nous Research, and it’s fantastic. I don’t have any of the security concerns I had before. It’s easy to use, straightforward to set up, and it has access to everything Jan needs: ClickUp, Calendar, Gmail, Google Drive, Slack — all the tools I rely on to get work done. It runs on my iPhone and it’s now powering Jan for me. Very happy with it.
OpenClaw: Free and Open-Source
For those interested in experimenting, there is a new open-source version of OpenClaw available that you can download and use right now, for free. You can plug in whatever language model you prefer, which makes it a reasonably safe option. That said, you’ll probably still need to be a little bit technical to get it running.
Claude Cowork — Getting Better All the Time
If you want something easier to get started with — something that helps you wrap your head around an agentic-first framework in business — have a look at Claude Cowork. I’ve spoken about it before, and they’ve since upgraded it significantly. You can now get it to schedule tasks, access your Gmail, your Drive, and all that sort of stuff, much like what I’m doing with Jan.
The other thing they’ve just announced is that you can now use it from your phone. So, if you’re out on the road having lunch somewhere, you can message your local machine back at the office and get it working on something for you or continue a conversation that you started before you left. A lot of people are saying great things about it, and there’s plenty more happening in that space.
Perplexity Ships Their Agentic Framework with a Mac Mini
Perplexity announced their agentic framework a couple of weeks ago. Now they’re shipping it pre-configured inside a Mac Mini — completely turnkey, out of the box, ready to go. All you need to do is pay the subscription fee, of course.
Manus AI Goes Desktop
Zuckerberg went out and picked up Manus AI, which I reviewed a couple of years ago. It’s an amazing assistant, an amazing agent. They’ve now developed a desktop version. One of the key advantages of these agentic frameworks is that when they sit locally on your machine, you get a lot more out of them. Previously, Manus AI was entirely cloud-based, so going desktop is a significant move and they’ve doubled down on that direction.
OpenClaw Is Coming to Microsoft Teams
Something that completely blew me away this week: a post from the Microsoft lead for OpenClaw — which I didn’t even know existed. I didn’t even know Microsoft was in that conversation, though of course it makes sense given that OpenAI bought OpenClaw. The post confirmed they’re meeting with Microsoft Teams to bring OpenClaw into that platform.
Now, this is the same agent that caused a high-profile incident where the head of Meta AI Safety had her entire inbox deleted — unrecoverable — because she was running OpenClaw on her local machine. Obviously, Microsoft isn’t going to let that happen to all their customers. And for anyone who’s been recommending OpenClaw, I’ve consistently said: don’t install it on your main machine. Put it on a clean, separate machine, because it can be unpredictable.
Hermes from Nous Research — what I’m using to power Jan — is nothing like that. It’s stable, it’s secure, and I get to choose which model runs underneath it. I’m very happy with how it’s sitting.
Jensen Huang and NVIDIA: Everybody Needs an Agent Business Strategy
Yesterday, Jensen Huang — CEO and founder of NVIDIA — came out and said that every business should have an agent business strategy. Agents first. The reason is simple: it’s so much more valuable, and you get so much more done.
He acknowledged the risks for enterprise. These agents can access sensitive data, execute and create code, and communicate externally from the organisation — all of which is genuinely risky. But he also said they’ve worked through all of that, and the result is something called NemoClaw. This was developed with the help of the original developer of OpenClaw, so it’s not happening in isolation. The NemoClaw harness has been released and will likely be free, consistent with NVIDIA’s other recent releases.
They also released a new large language model this week which is awesome — I’ve already tried it — and that’s free too. Remember, NVIDIA is a hardware and chip manufacturer. Their play is that everything they build works best on their hardware, and with Apple pushing the M5 chip into the AI space, the competition is heating up fast.
Agents Are Coming to Your Storefront
Everything is converging around agents now — and that includes who’s visiting your online store.
Last week something really clicked for me again after stepping back from the traditional SEO world for a while. SEO folks are still debating things like the value of schema markup and whether large language models use it or not. But if you read the research, even the people building neural networks don’t fully understand what’s happening inside them. What we do know — and anyone who’s been using these tools for the past three years can tell you — is that if you structure your inputs properly, you get better outputs. That’s what we’re really talking about when it comes to your website. It’s about structuring your inputs — your metadata, your descriptions, your content — so that AI can make sense of it.
Harvey Finkelstein, President of Shopify, also came out this week and said they’re working toward a future where the majority of traffic on your site is people’s shopping agents, not people themselves. That makes complete sense to me. It’s what I wrote about in my book two years ago, and it’s what’s happening now because it’s simply logical.
That’s why applying old SEO frameworks to what large language models are doing isn’t helpful. What you need to be doing is making sure that large language models — and the agents they power — understand everything your customers need to know. What are shoppers asking? What are the frequently asked questions? Are you already answering them in your metadata and product descriptions?
I had a client a couple of years ago where we ran some competitive analysis using a few AI tools. We found that one of their products had no IP rating listed and no information about whether batteries were included. Nothing in the description, nothing in the meta fields. The client said, “Oh, I get asked about that all the time.” And the answer is simple: put it on the page, because agents need to know that. That’s what shoppers are asking. That’s what your customers are asking. These are the details that traditional SEO overlooked, and that modern SEO still doesn’t seem to want to look at.
SKAW: Built for the Agent-First Future
That’s why we’ve built SKAW, and I’m happy to say you can download and install it on your Shopify store today. We already have a list of improvements coming and they’ll start rolling out next week, so if you have any feedback, please send it through — I’d love to hear it. I’ll put the link in the description. https://apps.shopify.com/skaw
Everything we’re building in SKAW is centred around one question: if someone’s shopping agent was trying to buy this product, could it do it? SKAW tells us and shows us the answer. With every client so far, we’ve found work that needs to be done — work that would have been far too time-consuming and cost-prohibitive to identify manually. Now we have the app, we can see what’s going on, track how scores change day to day, see which bots are visiting the site, and identify which pages they’re landing on. It gives us a clear, practical picture.
We currently have three clients running it, and I’ll be onboarding more soon. No case studies to share just yet, but if you want to be one of the first, please let me know.
As always, if you found this useful, please like, share, and subscribe. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments wherever you’re watching or reach out to me at jim@stewartmedia.biz. We’ll see you next week. Thanks very much — bye!
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