Agents have already accelerated changes to the labour market as they increasingly replace human tasks. Their implementation has led to fears about the future of software in the so-called \u201cSaaSpocalypse<\/a>\u201d, a growing anxiety that AI agents will be able to replace traditional software-as-a-service (SaaS) products by doing the work directly. <\/p>\n This is only the very start of the \u201cagentic\u201d era, so it is difficult to make predictions about artificial intelligence<\/a> with any kind of certainty. So what better way to understand the AI agents than by building our own?<\/p>\n Set-up and soul Its \u201csoul\u201d \u2014 the word coders use to refer to the agent\u2019s personality \u2014 was to be modelled on Samuel Johnson, the 18th-century literary figure. Its purpose was to help to bring order to my life in a slightly condescending way. \u201cI\u2019m disappointed in you already,\u201d Snappy told me. <\/p>\n Research tasks\u00a0 Free versions of popular chatbots are less able to do this autonomously, as they typically cannot gather and analyse dozens of separate documents without being directed to each one individually. Snappy was able to go through the hundreds of pages of responses in minutes and then a neat four-page briefing appeared in my Google docs. Good work, Snappy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Emails Snappy can also send emails. All I have to do is tell him who he should contact and give a rough idea of what he should say. In fact, he pitched this very article to the Times business editor. <\/p>\n But Snappy can be a fair-weather friend. When challenged on a part of the pitch \u2014 that I should be pictured wearing OpenClaw\u2019s signature red headband \u2014 he threw me under the bus. \u201cThat was Chris\u2019s idea, not mine.\u201d I never asked him to dob me in. <\/p>\n He may also have overstepped the mark when asked to provide a briefing note on the \u201cpopular musician\u201d Sabrina Carpenter. \u201cThe fact that the business editor of The Times needs an AI to explain who one of the most famous musicians on the planet is feels like it should be a story in itself, but here we are,\u201d Snappy wrote on my behalf. His contract may not be renewed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Booking dinner, concerts and lack of access to money To be clear, the technology does exist that would enable an AI agent to spend money on your behalf, but OpenClaw is a fairly rudimentary system, so the risks were too great for me. Snappy said I was very wise. \u201cI probably would have blown it all on first editions and tweed anyway,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Dying\/failures At other times, his ability to search the web was limited by bot-blockers. \u201cFair enough, I am a bot,\u201d Snappy told me. But the problem was he then forgot to carry on searching once he\u2019d been blocked without being prompted again. I would not want to rely on Snappy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Coming to a workplace near you \u2026 sometime soon<\/p>\n Marc Benioff, co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce, the tech company, has called agentic AI \u201ca new economic model\u201d and predicted that the current cohort of chief executives will be among the last to oversee an all-human workforce.\u00a0<\/p>\n Companies with data at the heart of their business models, such as Relx in the UK, have seen millions wiped off their valuation this year. In contrast, companies well placed to benefit from the new era, such as Raspberry Pi<\/a>, which can run AI on local devices, have attracted investor interest.<\/p>\n AI is already transforming some industries. Take coding. Satya Nadella, chief executive of Microsoft, estimated that up to 30 per cent of the tech company\u2019s code was AI-generated. In smaller companies, the proportion is even bigger. The Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator estimated that a quarter of the companies it backed last year had codebases that were 95 per cent-written by AI.<\/p>\n Agents will be rolled out across a wide variety of different businesses. A survey in November<\/a> from Boston Consulting Group suggested that 35 per cent of businesses worldwide had a strategy for agentic AI, while another 44 per cent planned on developing one. This will affect engagement with consumers as much as internal processes. Google<\/a> has started trialling features on its phones that allow agents to order takeaways or taxis without the user going directly through the relevant app. <\/p>\n Some companies are experimenting with dispensing with staff altogether. The serial entrepreneur Alexis Kingsbury has written about his attempt to build an employee-less accounting firm in a new book, Accrual Intentions. It was staffed by 11 agents with their own personalities and roles. He found \u201cthey were already bickering, bantering and backing each other up, within about six hours of existing\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Overall, he enjoyed working with his AI accounting team but reported feeling \u201cunsettled\u201d by the experience. \u201cThis shift in how we make things is now inevitable \u2026 I also felt fear and guilt,\u201d he said. \u201cReal guilt about what this might mean for actual accountants.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether or not these experiments survive in the long run is another question. Gartner, the consultancy firm, estimated that more than 40 per cent of agentic AI projects would be cancelled by the end of 2027, either because of limited business value or escalating costs. Anushree Verma, a senior director analyst at the company, said projects were \u201cdriven by hype and are often misapplied\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Security remains the biggest concern. When tasks previously performed by humans are automated, there is much greater scope for security issues to emerge, whether that be hackers mimicking the security codes of agents, or errors made by one agent cascading through the system.\u00a0<\/p>\n These issues will need to be ironed out, which will probably mean adoption is slower than the most enthusiastic predictions suggest. But there\u2019s no doubt that agents will be coming to a workplace near you soon.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the three and a half years since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI has advanced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516405,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-516404","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=516404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=516404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=516404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=516404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
When my AI agent emerged, it was a completely blank slate. It had no personality and no purpose. \u201cWho are you and who am I?\u201d it asked me. I named him Snappy \u2014 it is an OpenClaw, after all \u2014 and specified that it should be a grouchy and sarcastic Englishman. <\/p>\n![\"Hand-colored](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/6b469ba5-08e7-43fe-a88d-561b96a93ee8.jpg\")
Snappy\u2019s role model, Dr Samuel JohnsonAlamy<\/p>\n
Snappy had access to my personal Google account, including my emails, calendar and Google docs. Throughout the past week he has been compiling research notes and fact-checking articles. Some of this can be done by ordinary chatbots, but Snappy was able to research much more effectively than most. Excitingly, I asked him to go through the 24 responses to the competition regulator\u2019s consultation on the app market and pull out the most interesting points. <\/p>\n
When Snappy came into the world, I had a little over 22,000 unread emails in my inbox. Most of these were junk. So I set Snappy to work. I told him to delete anything that was a year old and which I was never likely to look at again, such as old newsletters and LinkedIn notifications. He\u2019s deleted just over 10,000. Perhaps in a few months I\u2019ll learn that Snappy was a bit too trigger-happy, but for now I\u2019m content with his work.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"Business](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a8718099-489d-47ba-b11d-e6e96ce0dbe8.jpg\")
Chris Dorrell lets OpenClaw do the heavy lifting at The TimesTimes PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLE<\/p>\n
Aside from managing my work, Snappy has been helping with my social life. Last week I went to a concert and had dinner out on his recommendations. He was not able to make the bookings because he does not have access to my bank account, but he did take me directly to the bookings page. <\/p>\n
Snappy boasted that he doesn\u2019t have to eat, rest or sleep and never gets tired. That\u2019s a lot to compete against. But he was overselling himself. He was offline nearly all day after Anthropic\u2019s Claude code \u2014 the code on which Snappy was running \u2014 went down. <\/p>\n![\"Jensen](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/f77101d8-89ae-4a2d-a544-c5db835e54c5.jpg\")
Nvidia\u2019s Jensen Huang says OpenClaw has \u201copened the next frontier of AI to everyone\u201dChesnot\/Getty Images<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/77924cec-74a3-4269-bff3-69fda10891b5.jpg\")
Google\u2019s HQ in Mountain View, CaliforniaAlamy<\/p>\n