alt Hacker News> It has a CRM focus because we asked a couple dozen hard-core OpenClaw users "what do you actually do", and it was sales automation, lead enrichment, biz dev, creating slides, linkedin outreach, email/notion/calendar stuff, and it's always painful to set up.
So basic automation and forcing the web to be "open"...
No one is talking about how AI is going to destroy business models that are dependent on dark patterns, on walled gardens, on poorly designed one size fits all implementations (so many things wedged sideways into sales force).
Yea, it has been a little shocking to me that the rising narratives around "AI agents everywhere" and "enable the web for AI agents" requires what we've all been wanting for awhile on the web (openness and interoperability) but that the same big players in tech have been clearly against for a long time. Like the fact that Google recently released that Google Workspace CLI (https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli) is a perfect example.
They could've released something like that years ago (the discovery service it's built on has existed for over a decade) but creating a simple, accessible, unified CLI for general integration apparently wasn't worth it until agents became the hot thing.
I wonder when / if there will be a rug pull on all of this. Because I really don't see what the long-term incentives are for incumbent tech platforms to make it easy for automated systems to essentially pull users away from the actual platform. I guess they're focused on the short term incentives. And once they decide the party's over, promising upstarts and competition can get absorbed and it'll be business as usual. Idk, we'll see.