AI Agents Like OpenClaw Are Here. How Can You Use Them?

WSJ What’s News

The Wall Street Journal

News, Daily News

4.1 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2026

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AI agents—artificial-intelligence tools that can perform real-world tasks—are the buzziest thing in Silicon Valley. Some businesses and individuals are already using them, and the next generation of agents like OpenClaw could be even more promising. But they also come with significant risks. WSJ tech reporter Isabelle Bousquette joins host Alex Ossola to discuss how agentic AI is being used now and how it could be used in the future. Further Reading: China’s OpenClaw Craze Buoys Tech Stocks, Fuels AI Pivot The World’s First Viral AI Assistant Has Arrived, and Things Are Getting Weird This Viral AI Project Went From Side Hustle to Coveted Prize in Three Months Nvidia Software Aims to Bring OpenClaw to the Enterprise Silicon Valley’s New Obsession: Watching Bots Do Their Grunt Work Mark Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent to Help Him Be CEO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:32.0	Hey, What's News listeners. It's Sunday, March 29th. I'm Alex O'Sullough for the Wall Street Journal.
0:38.2	This is What's News Sunday, the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.
0:48.5	On today's show, agentic AI is the busiest word in tech right now.
0:52.8	AI agents are taking on tasks like tracking customer
0:55.7	orders and making restaurant reservations. And the next generation promises to be even more
1:01.1	powerful, becoming kind of like a personal assistant. But AI agents also come with big risks,
1:07.4	even as they may stand to finally help tech companies make money off artificial intelligence.
1:12.7	Journal Tech reporter Isabel Busquette joins me to discuss.
1:22.0	Isabel, when developers or companies refer to an AI agent or AI assistant, What do they mean? Like, what is that?
1:29.2	This is a very overhyped, overused term, and I don't think the industry has a common definition.
1:35.8	But at its base, an agent is an AI that can do something for you. It becomes agentic when you say, make this restaurant reservation for me,
1:47.8	book this doctor's appointment for me, book this flight for me, buy this dress for me,
1:53.7	anything where it's going out into the world and executing some behavior on your behalf,
2:00.0	that's the point at which it becomes an agent.
2:02.7	When companies talk about using AI agents, how are they using them?
2:07.4	We're seeing two kind of big categories emerge so far. One is in the coding space.
2:12.2	There are a million companies that offer this from the Claude Code and OpenAI Codex of the world to cursor,
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