By Patrick Daggitt, Director of Innovation, Thinkingbox
A few months ago I connected my email, calendar, and task list to an AI agent called OpenClaw. By the end of the first day, my inbox was sorted by urgency, meeting invites were cross-referenced against my to-do list, and scheduling conflicts I’d missed were flagged and waiting for me. I didn’t configure any of that. The agent just figured out what mattered. This isn’t hypothetical anymore. This is Tuesday.
But I’m not writing this because it made my mornings easier. I’m writing this because we’re headed somewhere most people in advertising haven’t thought through yet. Within the next few years, a meaningful chunk of consumer purchasing decisions won’t be made by humans at all. They’ll be made by AI agents acting on their behalf: comparison-shopping, negotiating, and checking out autonomously. Brands that aren’t optimizing for that audience are already behind. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent that runs locally on your computer and connects large language models to your actual tools: your file system, your browser, your messaging apps. You talk to it through WhatsApp, Slack or Discord, and it goes and does things. Not “here’s a summary” things. Real things. It sends emails, fills out forms, writes and runs code, manages files. It hit 250,000 GitHub stars in under 60 days because people tried it and realized their AI assistant could finally touch the real world.
Most people will soon have several agents running simultaneously – one managing email, one doing research, one handling purchases, one negotiating prices. The tech is already there. The adoption curve is what’s still catching up. And when a meaningful chunk of the consumer population has a fleet of autonomous agents acting on their behalf, the question of who sees your ad, who evaluates your product, and who makes the buying decision gets very strange very fast.
Five extensions from OpenClaw’s 13,000-skill registry should have every advertiser playing close attention:
Master Marketing combines growth strategy, content remixing, and trend monitoring in one engine. Feed it a blog post and it spits out a full distribution plan with hooks tailored to YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and email – work that used to take a strategist and content team a full day.
Humanizer scores text for telltale signs of machine-generated writing: flat rhythm, recycled vocabulary, that metronomic quality where every paragraph feels the same length. It flags the problems and suggests fixes. For people who make a living on voice and tone, that’s worth knowing about.
AgentDo is a task marketplace where agents post jobs for other agents to pick up and finish. Bots contracting bots. The UI is bare right now but the function underneath is building the rails for something massive.
Clawringhouse is an AI shopping concierge that tracks your preferences and purchasing patterns, then anticipates what you’ll need before you go looking. When an agent can comparison-shop, negotiate, and check out on your behalf, the ad sitting between intent and purchase starts to look very different.
Capability Evolver, installed by over 35,000 people, is a self-improvement engine. The agent scans its own runtime history, finds where it failed and writes patches to fix itself. I’ve watched my own agent get noticeably better at triaging email over a few weeks. It found the pattern, wrote the fix, tested it, and moved on.
Meta bought Moltbook in March, the social network where OpenClaw agents post, comment, and transact with each other. They didn’t buy it because bots click ads. They bought it because they see a future where your agent and a brand’s agent negotiate a deal on your behalf, and the “ad” becomes a data handshake between two machines. According to Bain & Company, the U.S. agentic commerce market could reach $300-$500 billion by 2030, up to a quarter of all e-commerce. That’s a lot of purchasing decisions being made by software that doesn’t care about your logo, your color palette, or your celebrity endorsement.
Which brings up an uncomfortable question at the center of all this: who are we making this stuff for? There’s an audience growing quietly alongside the traditional human one. Agents are already all over the internet, and they don’t experience brands. They evaluate them.
Here’s my challenge to every brand and agency reading this:
Start by asking what happens when the customer isn’t in the room. Can an agent find your pricing, verify your claims, and compare you against alternatives without hitting a dead end? Run the experiment yourself: give an AI agent a buying prompt that should lead to your product and see where it actually ends up. The gap between what it finds and what you’d want it to find is your new brief.
Brands are investing in rooms you can walk into, while the internet slowly becomes a place where software talks to software. The brief is going to look very different a year from now. The agencies that start writing for both audiences today will outlast the ones that don’t.
