OpenClaw vs Claude: The Truth About AI Agents (Costs, Chaos, and What Actually Works)

Conrad O'Connell, thank you so much for joining us. Um, so before I let you do a bit of an introduction, uh, what we've been doing today is we've been delving into OpenClaw mostly. We've been chatting a lot about OpenClaw, but what I want from your session is— well, we'll dabble a little bit into the claw, but I also want to talk about the other agents and the other platforms that people who are watching this with us now or later can, can dig into. So before we get going, uh, Connor, just give a little bit of background about yourself, about the business, and just sort of delve into your journey into OpenClaw law, if you don't mind, to get going?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So Conrad, founder of Build Up Bookings, we're a digital marketing agency, we work specifically with, you know, short-term rental vacation managers. Our focus is primarily on search, social and email marketing. So that's where we spend most of our time helping clients get more, you know, traffic visibility. You know, direct bookings is kind of one thing we go down the rabbit hole a lot on. So that's— people can learn more, do some more digging on that if it interests them. I think to go to your second question, probably why people are actually listening. Is, um, I don't know, there's something about it. I don't know where exactly it is in my brain where I just look for the new thing. And for me, like, usually that surfaces on what is now known as X, but what I still reflexively refer to as Twitter. So like, I will just scroll Twitter and I'll just look for things, and if I find it interesting, I'll dive into it. So I feel like that's where I've gotten— that's where I got the bug, you know, or whatever it was, uh, or the, uh, the original Claude bot name, and now it's Open Claude or whatever. But where I first installed it back in January was off seeing a Twitter thread of like, this is novel, this is new, this is interesting, you should play with it, it has all these capabilities. And I don't need much more encouragement than that for me to be like, okay, let's try it, you know, like I just have that mindset a little bit with when it comes to software.

So I remember seeing your LinkedIn post a good 3 or 4 weeks ago now. And you put a post and a picture up of your Open Clause. So do you want to delve into the name and how you came to it and sort of like how you got started and how you got cracking with it?

Yeah, in the terminal, like it asked during onboarding, like, what do you want to call this thing? Or maybe it's when you first set up the Telegram bot, I forget at this point. But I was like, I don't know what to call it. You know, I just thought of a silly name. And then of course, as soon as I posted it, people had better names, you know, in the comments underneath on LinkedIn. But I think I was going golfing that day or the next day. And I was like, alright, it'll just be a golfing lobster, like no one else will have that, right? So I called it BogeyBot. So I like alliteration, if you haven't got that yet, you can build up bookings, all these kind of things.

BogeyBot. So we got the BogeyBot. So how did you set it up? Did you go and dust off an old computer that's in the office? Or did you go and do the servers that a couple of people are doing? How did you go ahead and set this up?

Neither. And maybe I did some things that again, you know, some people would say are riskier. So I'll admit that like you should do your own research and diligence, but I put it on my main machine, you know, and I didn't give it access to everything, but I put it on my main computer, which has mostly been a positive. I do think that there are some downsides to that that you want to be aware of, particularly when it's doing browser actions. Like it can literally hijack your computer. So you're in the middle of a meeting or like we're recording right now. And if it were to go trigger a browser action, it would like actually open a tab and like, you know, the other screen over here and start doing things in the browser. Um, which is a little odd and futuristic when you think about it, but it does, it can't like disrupt the actual workflow of what you're trying to do in the day if you put it on the main machine. But for me, honestly, it was just not having the desire to go and with, um, you know, uh, mess with servers, configs, and all that kind of stuff. And I actually think having it locally on my machine is, is safer because I can actually sort of keep an eye on it, look at it every day, etc. And I just don't have another machine handy that I could put it on that I feel like would actually, you know, be ready to go when I, when I'm done with my computers. I typically sell them. I don't have a lot of backups. I have one backup, but it's in use by my kids. So I hesitate to.

So this is fascinating. So you give it to your main computer, right? So how do you decide on what it can and can't do, what it gets access and it doesn't get access to?

I was relatively, again, this is like maybe my personal tolerance for risk is higher than other people. I also think I have really good like operational security on things that I would, you know, be worried about it doing. For example, you know what I mean? Like I did, for example, I didn't give it email access. Um, so that's one line that I did draw where I'm like, okay, that probably seems like more bad than good. Um, I have done that with other tools like Claude, for example, I have done that, uh, in read-only fashion, but I did not do that for Open Claw. But I mostly gave it access to things that are local on my machine. So obviously like file folder structures where we have reports or where we have, um, you know, different information. I did give it access to like Basecamp, which is our project management system. A lot of people use something like Asana or something like that, but that's, that's what that has access to there. And, um, transcripts. So like when we do calls, everything is transcribed. Um, the particular software we, we use for that was called Granola. I know there's a lot of others out there that do something similar, you know, transcribe. I think you've talked about some of them before. So that's, that's what I more so gave it access to because again, if you think about it like a personal assistant or something like that, you may or may not give a personal assistant access to your email inbox. That's more of a depends on what they're doing type thing, but they for sure would have access to like your to-do list, your calendar, you know, your meetings, um, notes that you have from those things, your task list. Those are things they would have access to. So those to me felt like the way to go. So that's where I, I started for sure.

And before we talk about Claude and the other agents that are out there now, how are you using it? So you've, You give it access to transcripts, which is great. Uh, got access to Basecamp. It's got access to a few things. Like, how are you then taking all that information and how are you personally using it in, in your day-to-day?

Yeah, the first use case I had, and this is, this has been refined a little bit since when I first started with it, but I, again, on Twitter or X or whatever, I saw a thread originally where someone was like, okay, you've seen all the hype threads, like zoom out from that for a second, pause for a second, take a breath and say, If I was gonna hire someone tomorrow and they had, you know, I wasn't paying them anything basically, or I'm paying them virtually nothing and they could just help me with things, what would be the things they would help me with? And that reframing sounds simple. Like everyone would nod their head and go like, yeah, of course. Like that's what you should be doing. But then we get a little distracted maybe by like all the shiny object things that we might see online about what this thing does. So I said, okay, for me, what I often struggle with personally, and maybe I'm oversharing here, but I'll share it and let the consequences stay, is just having the right context when I go into the calls that I have because I'm often booked like back to back. Like it's not uncommon for me to be booked back to back on calls Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, like Friday, even some days. Um, so that's, that's a common thing. And I always feel like I never feel like I do enough prep, to be honest with you. Maybe it's just a skill that I've developed over 10 years where I don't need to do as much prep as I should. And I can get on the call and bring up numbers relatively quickly and dive through things and my brain can process them, but it's not optimal. Like we all, what would be more optimal is me doing more digging before the call and having some things you know, a little bit more prepared. And we have client success team members that help me with that as well. So it's not like I'm completely solo in this, you know, in the, in the nature of how my work works, like how my agency works. But yeah, that's the thing that I started with was like, okay, at least gimme like the last 30 days summary of everything that this client has been working on with us. Because to, to be frank too, I'm not privy to everything that goes on. Like comments may happen in Basecamp, projects may happen in Basecamp that I'm not looking at. So for me to get a little summary of that, that's just like you're meeting with Mark tomorrow. In this case, pretend you're a client. Um, Mark is doing PPC ads with you. Um, here's the last 30 days of communication between him and someone on my client success team, or he sent 2 emails about this, he replied to it. And I just forget, to be honest with you, like I just, by the time 25 days by, I don't remember what we talked about 25 days ago, at least not to recall, you know, in that second. So I really just started it like a prep, like a, like prep me for the meeting, give me more, as much information as possible, summarize it, and then send it to me the morning of so I can read through that. Like it's called pre-reads, like I do all my pre-reads, which I actually stole that from like a president. I guess the president has that something similar to that, or maybe in the UK, the Prime Minister or something, they literally just get a morning briefing. It's like, you're meeting with these 4 leaders today, here's 9 things you need to know about each of these people and what's going on. And that's how they, you know, ask about their kids and know what they're struggling with and what's going on in their countries. It's not like they actually know everything. That yes, the people are— countries are very smart, but they don't know everything, right? Um, it's that they get prepped, you know, beforehand. So that's kind of what it started for me. Yeah, I was doing that.

That's fascinating. And how are you chatting with Bogey Bot? Are you doing it on Telegram? Have you figured out something else? Like, how are you sort of chatting to it?

Yeah, kind of. Maybe this has been my story so far that you've noticed. I just went for the path of least resistance. So I know there are other ones you can set up. Actually, frankly, I had a Telegram account, or maybe I'd registered one previously. I've never used Telegram really. Like, there's no friends or family or team members that I message on there. So I put the app back on my phone and got it connected and just went for their— like, it went on their onboarding list. It was like, this one's the easiest. I'm like, cool, let me do that. Like, I don't mind using a different messaging app. You know, I know some people use like Slack or other, um, messaging things. But for me, I was like, let me just try the easy one and kind of see, again, look for the path of least resistance to get it going. So that's what I chose was Telegram.

Do you chat mostly on your phone to it? Or you got to like an app on your computer open? Like, how do you know, mostly like engage and dial in with it?

It's probably 70% on my computer and then 30% on my phone. The phone thing is really helpful because I'm not in front of my computer 24/7. So like, it is helpful to be like, you know, again, I could, I could go prompt it and ask it to do things for me. Again, think of it like a junior employee that will do things for you. Hey, I'm in the middle of meeting right now and Mark wants to know how his analytics is doing. If I was, if I'd given the right access, it could go in and say 30-day summary report of analytics. It could do that while we're chatting, that sort of thing. So that's when I use it more on the desktop. But yeah, the phone use is valuable because you can have it do things for you while you're away and then you come back and those things are in a somewhat complete form.

So if you're on the golf course and you're like halfway around and you're like, oh shoot, I wish it could do this, boom. Up you go, type a little message, voice note it in, and it's done when you get back. That's nice. Exactly.

Yeah. And clients who are listening, I'm never on the golf course during the week, of course, you know.

Of course, of course, of course, of course. And you've given it read access only, so it can't write anything, it can't change anything, but it gets to read a lot of things.

Yeah, at least not my email. It can read into like, or it can write into Basecamp, it can write into like Calendar, for example, a few things there. But I, I did stop one step short of it where it can't write an email for me, but it can, you know, read the emails and go through everything in Calendar. It can go through everything in Basecamp, um, et cetera. And the transcripts, but it can't, the only thing it can't write into right now is email. But I don't know, I don't worry about that too much, to be honest with you, like at giving that permission because maybe it, maybe it's just me not being as concerned about it or you see a few horror stories, but maybe this is just my personal tolerance for like, you know, putting a little more risk into it. You gotta figure out what's fair to you or you wanna do, but I wouldn't be opposed to it now, now that I understand how it works better.

Fascinating. And this is what I've loved, is that we've had 3 different people on so far, we've got 1 more to come, and every single person has done it a different way. And that's fascinating. So there's more than 1 way to go about this. And the next thing I want to ask you about, and this is what I really wanted to hone in with you, is about the different agents. We've obviously chatted about OpenClaw a lot so far today, but there are ways and means that other companies are now catching up, Claude being one. So just break it down for us, the, um, Anthropic and OpenAI and Google. Just break down those companies for us. And then what have you noticed more with Claude ever since Peter Steinberg decided to go with OpenAI and not, you know, a Meta or an Anthropic?

Yeah, so playing with both these platforms now, the one I can feel like I can speak most confidently on is like the, the Cowork platform specifically within Claude. Obviously there is like a Claude Code that's probably a little bit more meant for developers. Yes, there are many non-developer use cases, but it's a little bit more intended for developers. I'm not a developer, don't pretend to be one. Um, so I, again, 90% of my use case of the Claude updates have been in the Cowork function specifically. Here's the analogy that I've been doing, or I came up with this the other day. I think it's the right one between these two platforms. If you're considering both of them, OpenClaw is kind of like a, um, a race car. Like it's, it's somewhat unstable. Like it breaks sometimes. It doesn't always work very well. Uh, it's very expensive, by the way. We haven't touched on that yet, but if you're using OpenClaw a ton and you're using the latest models from OpenAI or from, um, Anthropic, you know, using those, those high value tokens, I mean, I easily burned through like 40, 50 million tokens in the first few weeks getting everything set up and, you know, getting the hard parts.

You say 40, 50 million tokens.

What's, we sort of put in like a dollar amount to over $400 of tokens from Anthropic, like easily over $400 of tokens. Yeah. So like it was, it burned a lot, you know, and, and I knew as it was happening and then I'm looking at it and like, again, so to do my race car now. The race car burns very premium fuel that's very expensive. You know, it kind of breaks a lot. You gotta have a crew of people there, fix it, that kind of thing. That's kind of how I feel with Open Claw. And then Claude to me, Cowork in particular, feels like a Mercedes-Benz, you know, or a BMW. It's a very premium thing that just like everything works out of the box. Maybe it's not quite as powerful as a race car fast. It's not that, um, you know, raw on the edges. It doesn't do the same sort of unhinged things that you could try with Open Claw., but it's a much more refined sort of experience. Like it feels very predictable when you're asking it to do things. Um, and that, that's honestly where I've, some of my use cases have gone to is like, well, I want a polished presentation. Open Claude, or excuse me, ClaudeBot. Excuse me, lemme try that again. Claude Cowork is the one. There's too many names here. The one that, yeah, doing that. A lot of my like day-to-day, like quote unquote knowledge work has really transitioned into that platform. And they've added some things over the past, like literally the past week as we're recording this. Um, that are really moving more in the direction of OpenClaw. So for example, Cowork added scheduled tasks a week ago. So those pre-reads, I'm now realizing that I can do them and I set up one to run in both systems actually this week to kind of compare and contrast between the two. And honestly, I'm really liking the ones outta Cowork better than the ones out of, um, OpenClaw. So like that already, that one I'm turning off OpenClaw and focusing on Cowork using that pre-read system.

So with Claude, you can connect that up to Basecamp, you can connect it up to all of the places that you already were connected in OpenClaw.

Unfortunately not Basecamp. They don't have a pre-built connector for Basecamp, maybe just because it's a less popular, you know, project management software. They do have other ones in there like Asana and I think Trello and some other ones that are quite popular, but they don't have Basecamp in there. Um, I did, I did end up finding like a third-party sort of connection, you know, with Basecamp, but it wasn't an official one like in the Anthropic, you know, database software.

Yeah, because you can do it via like, um, Superbase, or you can do it via like a third-party So you can go, yeah, um, because I've just done Airtable, Airtable into, uh, Claude or wherever via Supabase. So it pulls it all and it moves it around and you still get the data. It just got to go a little bit of ways to get it.

Yeah. Yeah. So, but whereas OpenClaw, like it, this is the difference again between the two. OpenClaw was like, it didn't exist. There was no prebuilt, obviously connector for Basecamp, but OpenClaw and there it was just like, oh, I'll build one. That was one, that was one of the things that spent and burned a few million tokens. It was like, I was like, cool, sounds good. Like go build it. Yeah.

You can build it. But it's going to cost you. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's good. So when you see people talking about, uh, on X or Reddit, and you're talking about OpenClaw, and they've got these things called a marketplace, and you can go and download skills per se, is that people that have created their own skill? Like, you connected up Basecamp, and then have they gone and put it public? Is that what we're talking about when people figure that out, or is that something else?

I would, I would differentiate between like a connector and a skill. Those are two different things, right? So like a skill is really more so just similar to like how an OpenAI project works where it's like more so a set of instructions for Claude to follow. That's, that's how I think about the skills. So it's like when I'm like the most recent, the podcast that dropped literally to, you know, as we're recording this basically was Paul and I did an episode on, um, how to build a homeowner landing page. And we came up with these like 20 different ideas of like sections for a homeowner landing page, right?. So that I've now actually turned into a skill in Claude. So I can then prompt Claude and say, use this skill that I developed and build a homeowner landing page for whatever, insert vacation company here. And you have to give it the right context, right? You gotta paste in the, some information about the company, the name, et cetera, et cetera. But the skill is just a preset list of instructions to say like, just like you would give an SOP to a team member. That's kind of what a skill is.

More smart. Oh, I like that. A skill is an SOP. So technically now if you wanted to, you could just go and get your, Cloud or OpenClaw to, let's say, go to Myrtle Beach, go and find 10 property management companies in Myrtle Beach and go and look at their site, pull the data, create a landing page, and then could either LinkedIn message them or email them and say, hey, I built this for you for free. Let's chat if you want to chat more. So you could do outreach with it, really?

Yeah, I think, I think I haven't gone to the last few steps that you've referenced, but the first few steps that you referenced sound very feasible to me that would work right now out of the box. The last few steps may require a touch more, again, sort of like engineering or kind of like breaking it into smaller bits. Like, okay, let me do the outreach portion first. Let me then do the page generation second. Let me then, or excuse me, let me do the, like the finding, the scraping is kind of step one. The collection of the pages is sort of step two. The creation of said pages is step three, then the outreach is step four. So it could be something where it can't just, you know, in the Twitter world, you'll see people say like it one-shotted it, which is like you just put one prompt in there and it just does the whole thing. That seems like it could pull that off to me based on how you've described that. But I think if you broke it into 4 sections or 3 discrete sections of what you're doing, I think that's absolutely feasible. And that's where, again, I think systems still today very much need what I believe, like a lot of people would talk about is like human in the loop. I don't know if you've seen that terminology before. Yeah. But it's like, okay, at some point it's gonna stop, it's gonna finish. You're then there to do that next step, you know, and say, okay, how do we get there? And maybe this is just my own personal limitations, knowing what I know and knowing what I don't know. I think that's kind of a lot of where I find myself is like, okay, there's points where I have to stop, give it additional feedback, give it additional context, tell it to do the next thing or move it from one skill to the next or one thing to the next and say, okay, now that I've got this, let's start the next thing. I'm not seeing as much as people claim that like you can just click one button or do one thing and it's this autonomous thing that just goes end to end. I've not seen that as much.

It would be nice to have that next. That's the next level where you can just be the— so BogeyBot is the overriding person and then it's got all these different things happening between it and it can just be run on automation because I'm still struggling personally. Recently to figure out where it becomes a, oh, that's a nice to have, as in like it's pulling in my meeting notes, it's giving me like a little debrief before I chat to a, a client or a prospect, etc., to where it's genuinely generating money, um, and where it can start to do things like outreach like that, where if I was to pay a human to do that sort of outreach, we're talking a lot of hours and a lot of money. Right? Probably $1,000 to $2,000 for an appointment setter to go and do that sort of thing without even scraping together a website. But if you can get someone to sort of— or something to do that where it's getting in front of people, but then they go, yes, I want to book in a call, then that's pretty decent. The guest before your good self, um, he had created through his PMS— so I won't tell you who, but with his PMS he has created, um, uh, OpenClaw and he has created, uh, a LinkedIn profile, and it was a LinkedIn Business Dev. And we've just seen a live screen share where we— this, uh, uh, OpenClaw called Sophia has gone in and has actually booked in free demos for their sales team, which I find is fascinating. Like, a LinkedIn post has got, I think he said, 20 likes and, uh, about 30 comments. So that's the part of all of this where I'm thinking, right, as a business owner, if I'm going to sink time and energy into this thing I need for it to actually have a return of investment and not just, uh, me messing around with a few things. And it's like a— it's a nice to have because I'm taking away from the core reasons to run a business, you know what I mean? So that's where my head's at with all of this.

I, I'm not going to challenge you per se on that, but I'll— this is just my counterpoint to what you're saying there a little bit. I think that you don't know what it can and can't do until you get your hands on it, right? It's sort of like, I think the best thing for people to think about with like the new frontier AI technology is like finding a use case. And I think you actually have a really good use case, to be clear. Like your, your thinking is spot on in terms of like, this is where I need to go with it. This is my ultimate outcome from it. But then it's like the way to get there is gonna be a little messy. I'll be honest. Right. It's not gonna be like, I'm gonna set this up in one, one-hour session and then I'm done with it. Right. It's gonna be like, just like a person, right? You have to, you have to train a person over hours, tens of hours, hundreds of hours. Right. There's people on my team that I've spent 100 hours with on phone calls. And I feel like I still train them something new every week or every month where I'm like, oh, you didn't know about this. I taught you about this. That sort of thing. So that's kind of my like mental understanding of how I think about using these AI agents is like, it's not gonna be one-stop shop. It's gonna, but you have an end goal and that's what everybody should have, right? When they start this project, um, I know what I want out of it, or I know the problem that I'm missing, you know, I feel like I'm missing right now. This, these are the steps to get there. And then you're building, you know, each thing block by block, you know, Lego brick by Lego brick until you get where you wanna go. And expected to fail, like expected that there's going to be some, you know, wasted effort and time, and then you screw up and have to delete the whole thing and start over again. But then when you're done, like the promised land on the other side of this whole thing is exactly what you described, like when the agent is doing valuable work for you, and it's costing you $50 a month in tokens, and it would cost you $2,000 to do that with a person. And it never is sick, never calls out, never has any problems, etc. Then you're reaching that level.

Never comes in hungover. Yeah, all of those. Yeah. Okay, so You said earlier that if you see something cool on X, you want to give it a go. Have you dabbled with anything else? Because obviously Meta have got Manus, obviously OpenAI have got ChatGPT. Have you been dabbling with any other of these tools? Because personally, I've been dabbling with Manus quite a lot. Have you delved into that world outside of Claude or OpenClaw?

The only thing that's— the answer would be no on the Manus side in particular. The only thing that has me interested in that is the fact that it can do Facebook ads interface interfacing, obviously, because now Manus is owned by Meta, by Facebook. So that is one use case that I think I could personally find myself into. But I guess again, I'm— as much as I like to hop on the new thing, I also try not to overly get distracted, right? I try to timebox this kind of stuff and say, okay, let's not do 9 things and have 9 things be half complete. Let's try to get good at 1 or 2 things, um, which is how my mindset goes. But the thing that would appeal to me about something like Manus would be that, you know, with the fact that it has Meta access. But again, Meta would want that for other platforms too, right? Like, and presumably they will build some kind of connector so that people can spend more money on advertising, right, through their Open Cloud install, through their Cloud, you know, Cowork install, etc., etc. So my belief is that will come. It's just they built it natively for their own platform first.

Yes, I'm sure I saw somewhere that they've built one for Anthropic, or they're literally going to have the Anthropic one coming out very soon. And, um, I was one of the first Manus users. I jumped on that very shiny object and I used it quite a lot where Manus reached out to me and I've just got on a call with them this past week and I was chatting with their team in Singapore about the things that I like and don't like. And they said that the WhatsApp integration, so their version of Telegram, is coming very, very soon. So I feel like they are getting more into the meta world, Manus, and fascinating to see what they're doing.

But yeah, there's going to be competing agent systems just like there's competing operating systems, right? There's Android, there's iOS, there's Windows, there's macOS, right? Like the same thing, I think, will occur here. Um, and I think that it's, it's silly to think that there's going to be one winner. I think there's going to be likely multiple winners or depending on the use case, maybe prefer one or the other. Like for example, you mentioned about different AI platforms. I don't find myself going to Gemini a ton now. Um, but when I use Gemini, the image generation tools inside of Gemini are in my opinion, the best, like, I don't think you can make images that look on brand or match the right color scheme or fonts or whatever you're trying to do better than with like the Gemini AI Studio photo generation tool, like the Nano Banana stuff. Yeah. So anything, any other image tool I've tried other than that has been pretty okay to best, if not poor.

It's been so quick moving because at the start of this year, everybody was talking about Google. Everybody was talking about Gemini because they upgraded it and obviously like the Nano Banana and stuff. And now it seems like everybody's just gone so far away from using Gemini and they've gone like, you know, they've gone bouncing from, from, from one to the other. And you're right, there's not going to be one winner and there's going to be lots of winners, which is only going to be good for consumers because it means the cost will hopefully stay relatively low, uh, on that as well, right? So the guess—

I think they've already gone down. Yeah, I mean, Google had some stuff yesterday where they did like a 3.1 flash or something like that. That's like, it's like 80% as smart but, you know, 10% of the cost or whatever, right? Like, it's not quite as good as their newest stuff, but it's both faster and cheaper. So I think you're just going to see that, that token cost just continue to go down, down, and down unless a model actually has something unbelievably unique about it. Like, oh, this is the only model you can use to make images that look like a person, so therefore they can charge a premium for that. But it's tricky to know too, because they're still losing money on all this stuff. Like, I'm paying Anthropic a lot of money in tokens and subscription fees, and despite that, I know they're losing money on me. So that's the tricky part. We don't know where it's all going to land.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's obviously, there's a big, huge goliath that's just sitting back and watching everything, and that's Apple. So we don't know what Apple's play in all of this is going to be just yet. So your question, uh, the guest before you has left a question, and obviously after you've answered this, I'm going to get a question for you for the next guest. The question was, what was your aha moment when getting delved into these agents, and whether it's OpenClaw or Claude? And can you describe what that aha moment was? Do you have like that sort of, wow, this is pretty cool?

Yeah, I think for me it's, it's, um, well, actually I could think of one yesterday, so maybe good timing on that, which is I was doing the, the pre-read and it went into my inbox and found a meeting had been canceled and already suggested what the next steps were based on the fact that the meeting had been canceled. So it's sort of like the proactive nature of here's what happened. It knew about it before I did, cuz it went and read my email before I read my email and it was actually giving me the right suggestion on here's what to do, here's how to handle this situation, you know, and go from there. So that, that to me was definitely an aha moment on the proactive nature of where these AI agents can go when you give it the right context, when you give it the right information about what you're trying to achieve, you know, your business, all that kind of stuff. And to me it's like, it, it felt like a moment where, wow, the AI agent is smarter than me, which of course they're all smarter than me, but it's actually more, it's smarter and more personal to my situation than I thought of. Like it took me, it would've taken me some time to come up with the steps of this meeting was canceled. Here's the problems. You still need to do this. You still need to do this. It sort of started on that for me and then gave it back to me and said, here's what you need to do now with this time that was be canceled. Meeting was canceled. Now you need to deal with this problem this way. Wow. So that was very. 'What, what just happened?' kind of moment for me.

I think there's a lot of people who are on calls, as much like you said that you are, that will resonate a lot with that, which is good. Uh, before we get your question for the next guest, where do you see all this going over the course of the rest of 2026? Like, who and how and what are your sort of predictions with AI? And particularly, like, when we delve back into our industry of short-term rentals, like, what's your Mystic Meg sort of crystal ball view?

I feel like it's hard to do. Because if you asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have predicted exactly what has happened, right? In terms of these, you know, AI agents, I think it's reasonable to assume that maybe the pace will slow down a touch, right? I feel like right now, there's sort of this mindshare battle of, hey, we want to add in 1,000 functions. At some point, that mindshare battle will be more about like, where the winners are, like what platform ends up being the most polished, like, what do people actually end up using day to day and stick with for a little while? I don't think this idea, like you said a second ago, of like, swapping from model to model and system to system every 7 to 10 days is actually a good thing, to be honest with you. It's probably a little bit more of a distraction than anything. So I think hopefully we have a good idea or a good understanding on this is the model that, you know, like there's 2 or 3 that are kind of winning the war, you know, on attention. Um, you're using those regularly. And again, I think at the end of the day, we said this before we hit record, it's just software. Like it's just software that you're interacting with in the same way that a PMS is a software, an operating system is a software, Chrome is a software. Um, a project management system is software. So I think that it will just be to the, like, um, the transition we talked about before we hopped on was this idea of when I started in the industry in like 2014, there's people that were ditching on-premises PMS systems. So it used to be like, oh, we had a server in a closet somewhere running a PMS software, which if anyone hearing that today, they would just laugh at that. That's like absurd, right? But that was happening back from like 2014 to 2016, '17. There's people that were literally getting rid of on-premise software and going to the cloud. And now, like, no PMS that was launched today would describe themselves as a cloud software. They'd be like, well, of course it's a cloud software. It's like assumed, like you just, of course, that's how it goes. I think that same transition will kind of occur to some degree where it's like, of course there's an AI button here. Of course there's an AI interface here. Um, we won't even call it AI. We'll call it like, you even see this in Gemini a little bit, like a summary. This is just a summary of this email thread. They don't even label it anymore, but like, this is an AI summary. That's a summary, you know, of the, of it. So I think you're going to see a little bit more stability probably by next year. I think you're going to see a lot of different, I think the people that are most harmed by all these tools are. The low kind of skill, low wage workers. So I think they're going to see the worst punishment, um, particularly, you know, if you're a VA and you're overseas, let's say in Asia or something like that, I think you're in a tough spot because your work can now be probably done by one of these agents at less cost and less headache. And it's more controllable and there's lots of pluses there. So I worry about those people. I think anyone in the next year that's repelled by these things, that's like almost rejecting them out of, out of spite or out of premise. So I'm not going to use any of the AI tools. I don't want to do them. I feel like they're, they'll be very much left behind by people who are using them. And at some point they will succumb, you know, and they'll be like, I have to use these tools or I'm going to be, you know, very ineffective at my job and doing what I need to do. Um, but that may take, that may take more than a year to be honest with you. But I think by the next year it'll be very obvious, like team members or people on your team that are not embracing it, they're, they're not gonna do well. Like they're gonna really struggle. So those are some thoughts I have.

I have more, I guess, but— There's a, there was a crazy stat and I put it in the WhatsApp group chat for the geeking out on AI. And I feel like it was something along the lines of 0.04% of people have got a paid Claude account in the world. So if you've got a paid Claude account, even if you're just paying them $20 a month, you are already ahead of so many people. And it's just time to take advantage of it. You cannot be burying your head in the sand anymore. Like 2023, when it first came out, people were burying their head. 2024, people burying their head. Even last year, people were burying their head and not doing out. I think now's the year to really do something because you can, there's so much advantages to it. Um, did you see a scenario where somebody builds their own PMS with AI and they can literally be a one-man band? Like, is that something that you could see they could do?

I doubt it for a few reasons, which is that the variety of connections on the PMS layer is so vast, you know, so like if someone had built quote unquote vibe coded a CMS or build a CMS with one of these AI tooling, I think that it, it's all good until you start to chat with the, you know, OTA platforms and say, okay, I'm one, I have one person on this PMS and I wanna connect to Airbnb, right? Or I'm gonna connect to the, you know, booking.com or Vrbo or something like that. And they go, well, maybe like, maybe not. Like why would that benefit them versus using these prebuilt connections or APIs that they've worked with for a decade with someone like, you know, insert 1,000 PMS names here that are out there. Now, will you see some level of, um, this is the thing too, like people, people were talking about this and I talked about this a little bit with like WordPress kind of leaning into doing more on, you know, people are like, well, why would I use WordPress when I can build my own CMS in an afternoon and it does what I want it to do and doesn't have extra WordPress kind of junk or stuff that I don't need. And I'm like, fair, but now WordPress is going and they're built like they have a huge head start. They have a 10, 20 year head start on building a CMS. And now they're, they're open source. We just have all access to all these same things and they're building on top of them. So that's what I would say is like, let's say you're going to go try to rebuild Guesty or rebuild OwnerRes or Hostfully or whatever, pick, pick whatever. PMS you like there, well, those people in those companies have the same tools that you have. So they're already 10 years ahead of you and they're gonna keep adding more features and more functionality and go from there. So I, I really doubt it because I think that if you could actually do that, if you could build a functional, valuable PMS, you know, with a one, in a one-person environment, um, the best thing for you to do would be to sell it, not to use it for your own personal use case. Like all the people that the, the, the 99.46% that you mentioned a second ago that might need that PMS that are not using these tools are gonna be like, Well, how is it better than insert company name here, that sort of thing. So I'm kind of skeptical of that. But I do see people building tools on top of it. So like, you know, insert PMS name here doesn't have a cleaning module that's very good. I'm going to take my insert PMS name here and then build a cleaning module on top of it that's way better, but not rebuild the whole stack, but rebuild like little bits and pieces of the stack that they need in their business.

Add on extra things that will just talk to it and not replacing it, just adding on to it.

It is going to be fascinating. Because you can always have lanes about your software. Yeah. They always like, or let's say there is a housekeeping module, but they don't like it. Oh, you guys don't have a function for XYZ thing. Or, you know, with, with the template websites, as you know, you know, you and I have rallied against those in the past, you know, recently. Okay. Well, I actually was shown a demo by someone who sort of quote unquote vibe coded a, you know, his own website on top of, he uses Gatsby, like the Gatsby API. And he said, yeah, I did this in like 2 or 3 days and it's pretty functional. Like it's already there, you know? So. But again, that's not him replacing Guesty, that's him replacing his Guesty template website and him not wanting to pay a fee to hire Boostly or to hire Buildup or whatever the case may be.

So he can stop that. He can stop that. All right, let's just calm down him, that person, whoever that was. Just calm down. Don't tell anybody about that. That's like, it's our business model.

Yeah.

Fascinating. I've already said the website industry is screwed sooner or later. So fascinating times. Conrad, as always, I love chatting to you because you can take something really complex and just explain it in such a simple light. So someone like me Can understand. Thank you for coming on today and chatting about this. Really, really appreciate it. Now, before I let you go, do you have the question for my next guest who's going to be dropping in in any second now?

Yeah, yeah, it's— I wasn't expecting this, so I feel a little flat-footed on it to some degree. I guess my question for that person would be, what are all the— what do you think all the benefits will be, you know, let's say from, you know, this new AI agent revolution? And we can do the same thing a year from now. That's fine. I can steal that bit best guess, but it seems like a lot of the predictions out there, people want to focus on all the negatives. I would love to hear that person, the next person's perspective on all the positives. What are all the good things that are going to happen from this? Um, how are people going to benefit? How are people going to get to—

and that will be a nice way to end this live stream, the benefits, because yes, you can easily fixate, and all you have to do is go to any Reddit forum or X feed and see the fear that comes with all of this, job losses, etc. But what are the benefits? And that'll be a lovely way to end it. Conrad, thank you very much. Everybody, please thank him in the comment section. Uh, go check out Conor O'Connell on LinkedIn. Uh, some really good funny posts and just, uh, uh, just all-round great follow on LinkedIn. Thank you very much.

Appreciate it. Have a good one.