AI in practice
Grok Bot has just shown what mainstream adoption will look like
If you feel a purpose to make a difference in the world, AI agents are your best friend in making this purpose come to life and scale it without any barriers. The issue? Most people don’t have the technical skills to set up agents. Guess what Grok Bot just solved…
At the end of last year (yes, that’s how crazy early we still are, or how fast things are developing), someone called Peter Steinberger created OpenClaw. Back then it started as ClawdBot, which sounded a bit too much like Claude Bot, so he needed to change it when it got traction ;-)
Why I was sceptical for so long
Until then, I had been very sceptical about AI, seeing all the LinkedIn influencers hyping this just as any other new IT innovation. You received weekly prompt PhDs and weekly RIP [fill in any Microsoft tool]. For my book I even wrote a chapter debunking five myths about AI (download this chapter in pdf) and how each company is making all the classic new sexy toy mistakes.
At that point, yes, the ChatGPTs of this world were interesting, but my test each time was: is AI able to book me a flight? Because I wanted AI to DO things, not just be a huge knowledge source. And the use case for many people to have it write their blogs or posts just never appealed to me. A, because I like writing myself too much. And B, if you are an expert on something, AI will feel as if it’s only writing generic, superficial posts.
Until my inner IT nerd could no longer resist
Anyway, back to November 2025. I heard about ClawdBot in the Moonshots podcast of Peter Diamandis (tip!). It piqued my interest, but I also heard a lot of spooky use cases about it going off and emailing everyone in your address book and other stuff that meant you need to know what you are doing. So I ignored it for a few months more, until my curiosity and inner IT nerd could no longer resist.
A cleaned laptop, its own SIM, and a playground
So I cleaned an old Windows computer, bought a separate SIM for it, set up a separate Wi-Fi in my home and gave it its own Gmail account, so I kept it strictly separated from any of my actual accounts. Then the playground was ready, and boy, what a playground it turned out to be. In one weekend I redesigned a course I had created on a paid e-learning platform and built a complete, better app for it. What a joy!
That set me off on creating and building my Be Your Own CEO platform (beyourownceo.ai) and the rest is history, as they say.
Thirty years of IT was the entry ticket
What I noticed during this journey is that my IT studies from 30 years ago were a necessary background, or there is no way I could have installed OpenClaw and got it up and running. That is still the case today. You have to know pretty old school coding to understand how it works.
The Apple of agentic AI
That all changed on August 11th, when xAI (Elon Musk’s company) launched Grok Bot. It’s still in beta and too expensive for mainstream adoption, but it is showing the future of mainstream adoption of AI agents. I can’t remember who said it, but it was a nice way of describing it: “Grok Bot is the Apple of Agentic AI”. Super easy, simple, fast, intuitive. Zero technical knowledge needed. All agents have their own virtual computer in the cloud, so no need to set up your own servers.
Two days, and then they blocked me
I tested it, and burnt through their weekly limit in just 2 days. No “your limit is about to expire” warning, they just blocked me for 6 days. Not a great experience, to say the least. So it’s too expensive still, but for sure that will change. Their core contribution is that they showed the way forward on making AI agents available to anyone. Let’s see how fast other suppliers will pick this up and how xAI will make it more affordable in the coming months.
