86. From Chatbots to AI Employees: The Power of OpenClaw AI

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From Chatbots to AI Employees: The Power of OpenClaw AI

If you’ve ever wished AI could stop giving you suggestions and actually do the work for you, OpenClaw AI might be the thing that completely changes how you think about automation. In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I’m breaking down one of the most talked-about AI tools right now and why so many people are calling it the next big leap after ChatGPT.

What really caught my attention about OpenClaw AI is that it signals a move away from AI giving ideas and toward AI actually taking action on your behalf. I walk you through what this tool is, how it works as an AI employee rather than a chatbot, real-world therapist use cases, and the important security and HIPAA considerations you need to understand before experimenting with AI at this level.

AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:

  • Why OpenClaw AI is being positioned as an AI employee, not a chatbot.
  • How it can carry out tasks across your computer and browser without you present.
  • Practical therapist use cases for content, referrals, and practice growth.
  • Key security and HIPAA considerations to understand before using advanced AI tools.

Mentioned in this episode:  

Connect with me:

Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries: www.heyberries.com/therapists

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey everybody. This has been a wild week in ai. Like, I can’t even explain everything that’s been going on, but there are a couple big standouts that I think are super interesting. So we were in the clinical AI club implementation session meeting. It’s really becoming a mastermind in there. It’s the first Tuesday of every month.

[00:00:20] It’s supposed to be 90 minutes. We went two hours this week, and it’s really just, we’re talking about the latest cutting edge technology and how to use it to run your private practice. One thing that came up is this thing called Open Claw or Claw Bot. It was Claw Bot. Now it’s called Open Claw. So I don’t know if you guys have heard about this.

[00:00:38] I wanna do a little bit of a deep dive. One of the members said, yeah, have you heard about it? And I was like, yes, I have, but I’m scared to use it because I’m not sure like. About the security of it. So I’ve been researching it a little bit more and now of course I’m probably gonna download it and use it because it’s just, I mean, it’s too good.

[00:00:55] It’s amazing. This is like next level. So I wanna, just dig in, explain it a little bit and you know, if you have questions, always reach out to me. ’cause you know, I wanna help guide you guys through this.

[00:01:05] Now you know how most AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, everything, it gives you answers, but you still really have to do all the work. You have to copy, you have to paste it, you have to execute what it suggests, that sort of thing. So it gives you good copy. You still have to go like make the reel or whatever for your Instagram. Now, what if AI could actually do the work for you while you’re away from your computer?

[00:01:28] Right? That’s crazy, isn’t it? Now you guys know I’ve talked about perplexity. It’s got agents in there that’s kind of doing things for me. I’m setting it up and monitoring it. And all these agents do some of this stuff, but this, from what I’m understanding is next level. And of course I haven’t played it yet because I’m obscure too a little bit ’cause I’m just not sure about security.

[00:01:48] But let’s talk about open claw. So it’s open source AI assistant created by this guy named Peter Steinberger. He’s like this longtime tech guru. He has something to do with like creating PDFs and not Adobe, but something to do with like, PDF kit or something like that.

[00:02:06] Anyway, he created this thing called open Claw. It was called Claw Bot. Now it’s called Open Claw. It went viral in January, 2026. It’s February now. And the internet anyway says it’s getting more Google searches than claude code or Codex or, any of those new AI things that have come out.

[00:02:23] So this thing’s amazing. The website, lemme tell you the website so you can go check it out. openclaw.ai is where you go to learn more about it, if you wanna sign up for it, and of course use it your own risk. I don’t want anybody doing anything that might jeopardize their computer or files or whatever.

[00:02:39] So it’s not a chat bot, it’s what it looks like, but it’s not a chat bot, it’s an AI employee. So you interact through messaging apps you already use on your phone, like WhatsApp, telegram, discord, slack, signal, iMessage. I’m not sure the other ones, but I know those are some that I’ve seen people talking about using.

[00:02:57] So WhatsApp, I use that ’cause I’ve got. You know, I’m a partner with Berries. I’ve got a social media manager that I just hired. She’s in the uk. I talked to her on WhatsApp. So I’ve already got it on my phone. I’m already using it. It’s like on my homepage of my iPhone. So you set it up and you communicate with it through something like WhatsApp is my understanding.

[00:03:17] It can actually execute task across your digital life like your computer, but you don’t have to be present for it to do that. You talk to this thing through like WhatsApp, like you’re talking to another person.

[00:03:30] So this is some of the technical stuff. It executes shell commands and runs programs for you. It reads and write files on your computer. It can control your web browser, it can navigate sites. It can fill in forms, it can extract data for you. It can integrate with 50 plus services. So we’re talking Gmail calendar, Spotify smart home devices.

[00:03:50] Scary. Send proactive notifications and reminders. It can run scheduled task automatically for you. It can remember everything. So it has a persistent memory that learns your preferences over time. So it’s always learning you and what you like and what you don’t like, that sort of thing. And then people are comparing it to this.

[00:04:07] The original ChatGPT launch in terms of excitement. Like remember when ChatGPT first came out, if you were like an early adopter? I knew it at that moment. I was like, this is literally next level. This is gonna change our lives. And now all of this has happened since then. But that was definitely just like when iPhones came out or texting, like that’s how ChatGPT felt to me. People are likening this to that, essentially that kind of moment, that kind of movement.

[00:04:34] I wanna give you some examples. Okay. So like, to help you conceptualize what is the difference in this. And I, do you wanna say, as far as I understand, this is not HIPAA compliant, so I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t have this on a system where you’re opening your EHR or anything like that.

[00:04:48] I did see where people are going out and buying those mini Mac books and just putting stuff on it that they wanted to control and manipulate and not everything, not like, maybe not their banking information or something like that. So I did see that. I even saw a news report like the Mini Macs were like selling out in a lot of cities because of this open claw thing.

[00:05:05] Anyway, so I’m gonna give you an example. Okay. This is for therapist use cases. So let’s say you are talking to ChatGPT or Claude in the past, right? You’d say create a meditation script, right? The AI’s gonna give you like the text back. That’s a pretty good meditation script, especially if you give it a little more context and then you’re going to copy paste format, save it yourself, and then you’re gonna go manually post it to your website, or maybe you’re gonna go record it somewhere.

[00:05:30] Whatever you’re gonna do with it. Basically you’re doing all the work. So here’s an example. If you were using Open Claw to do something like this, okay, you via like WhatsApp, maybe you’re at a coffee shop, something like that, right? You say to into this WhatsApp conversation that you have, create 10 meditation scripts

[00:05:49] organize by anxiety level, save in my resources folder and add to my website. Okay? I’m not kidding. Open Claw will do all of that right away. So you’re at the coffee shop, you’re doing a WhatsApp. This thing has your computer at home. It’s gonna go create those 10 scripts. Organize it by anxiety level, that’s what you told it to do, and then save it in a resource folder, maybe like your Google Drive or something. And then it’s gonna literally add it to the back end of your website. I am not kidding, I’m seeing people talking about the stuff all over the place.

[00:06:21] So let me give you another example. content creation autopilot. Okay. You guys know I’m always thinking about this stuff. Tell Open Claw on Monday morning via like Telegram. That’s another messaging app. Every Friday, research trending mental health topics. Write a blog post for therapists and draft five social media posts promoting it.

[00:06:41] So this is what. Theoretically what happen with Open Claw, it does this every single week automatically. You never touch your computer. You just review and approve from your phone, so it’s gonna like report back to you essentially through the messaging app that you’re using. The result is consistent content marketing was zero weekly effort. That’s incredible.

[00:07:01] Another use case. Let’s see. The Proactive business manager, the scenario Open claw monitors your business email inbox. Now, this is not an inbox that would’ve PHI for me, like my coaching inbox. That would be fine. Or my business inbox. it messages you, it says you got an email about liability insurance renewal in 30 days.

[00:07:19] want me to review the policy and compare rates with three other providers? You reply, yes, that’s it. You get a message like that, you say yes. Guess what this Open claw does? It’ll go, it’ll research three to five insurance providers. It’ll compare coverage and rates. It creates a comparison spreadsheet, it sends it to you for a review.

[00:07:39] You never opened your computer. You’re literally like out for a walk and this thing is doing this for you. And I always put these little things in here. Why does it matter? It’s not waiting for commands, it’s actively watching and being helpful. So you’re telling it to monitor your inbox. And give you helpful suggestions and feedback based on, you know, what it knows about you, what, what’s coming into your inbox, and then it’s gonna like handle all of that for you.

[00:08:04] So it’s not even like, you know, a couple episodes ago I talked about like the Google agents and you can train them to monitor or train them to do like a, a series of tasks. Like any email that comes from so and so. I want you to apply this template and make a draft for me, it’s way smarter than that is my understanding.

[00:08:22] And again, I haven’t even gotten really into it. Of course, you know, even talking about it, I get so excited. I’m gonna have to download it. I, I think I’m gonna have to, I’ll probably get my entire identity stolen, but I’m going to do it anyway. Okay, another use case. Let’s see. Building while you sleep, before you go to bed, you can say this thing, build me a simple website where therapists can download my free worksheets.

[00:08:43] Make it look professional with a contact form. You are gonna wake up, it’s gonna be done. The site is live at a URL, let’s say one you’ve already bought. So I don’t, you know, I don’t know how detailed you have to get with this. So you could be like, yeah, I bought a URL from GoDaddy. I need to make it into a website that has all of this in it.

[00:09:00] And then you handle it, do it. And then it’s done. The site is live at the URL, there is an added contact form, an email signup, It’s already organized your worksheets by category. Okay? I don’t even, I’m saying this stuff, I don’t even believe it, but, but really, I’ve consulted a bunch of websites and this is what I’ve come up with based on what I’ve seen other people saying that it’s doing for them.

[00:09:22] Here’s another use case. Workshop prep workflow. I’m presenting on burnout prevention at a conference on March 15th. That’s all you say. You just say that into the messaging app. Open Claw will automatically research the latest studies on therapist burnout, create an annotated bibliography.

[00:09:39] Draft a presentation slides outline, set weekly reminders to practice finds and books, travel arrangements for you. Yes, people are allowing this thing to book their travel because it knows them, it knows their system, it knows their calendar, their schedule preferences, all of that. And then it sends you progress updates via text message through whatever app you’re using.

[00:10:00] That’s crazy. Okay here’s another one. Smart office environment. this thing can connect to systems that live on your computer. So if you have like a smart home system, right? People have these lights and music and temperature and all of that stuff. So, just talking to WhatsApp and say, dim the office lights to 40%.

[00:10:18] play my calming playlist on Spotify and set the temperature to 72. Open Claw connects to your smart home devices. It adjusts everything before you walk in. It creates the perfect therapeutic environment. This is actually for an office. I said, I said your home, but this is for your office.

[00:10:32] Let’s say in your office you have like a smart set up like that. You can have a do all of that for you. That’s crazy you guys. That is crazy. I mean, I guess technically with the smart systems, you would have an app, you’d probably open it up. You’d probably have to manually do all that, but now you can just say that you wanted to do this and it’s gonna do it for you.

[00:10:49] This is really blowing my mind. Okay, here’s another one. The Practice Growth Machine. Every Monday, find three therapists in my area who might want referrals. Draft a personalized introduction. Emails save for my review. And here’s what Open Claw is gonna do. It’s gonna research potential referral partners.

[00:11:05] It’s gonna write customized outreach emails. It’s gonna queue them for your approval, and it’s gonna help you build your network while you’re. Seeing clients. So it’s doing all of that in the background and literally you could tell it to do that every week like we’re talking about before.

[00:11:18] Here’s another one. Let’s see. Conference companion. At a conference take a photo of presenter slide, take a photo of the presenter slide with your phone message. Open claw. I’ll research these three therapy modalities mentioned and create a comparison chart. Get detailed results back before the next session. Yeah, that’s crazy.

[00:11:37] So it’s, it’s out doing the research. Real time while you’re sitting in a conference so you can get more information about their, what, what they’re talking about. Or even if you wanna like mingle, you know, and say, yeah, oh my gosh, yeah, you know, you didn’t research it, but you got a summary back basically of all these things.

[00:11:52] And it did it all while you were still sitting in the conference. Right? So then you go network between whatever, between classes and you could be like, yeah, well, you know, this does compare to these other modalities, so you seem super smart. I guess that’s like a way to do that.

[00:12:05] Let’s see. The other thing, self-improving ai, it can modify itself.

[00:12:10] So for example, you would say, I wish you could track when my blog posts get the most engagement open Claw would say, I’ll create a new skill to monitor that. Gimme a few minutes. It writes its own code to add that capability to its knowledge base, so you don’t even figure out how to do it. Really, like even with manus.

[00:12:28] Something I’m obsessed with. It came out with something called Skills recently, which I’ve really been adding a lot of skills to Manus that I do over and over again. You teach it how to do these like skill sets, and it’s really good at remembering that once you set it into a skill and you can just click the skill and it knows what to do.

[00:12:44] This is different. I’m not even having to program the skill, right? I’m having to just say, I wish you could do this for me. I want you to track my blog post to get, gets the most engagement. So in my mind, right, it’s gonna know, it’s gonna go on your computer, it’s gonna open up the backend of your you know, your WordPress site or wherever you keep that.

[00:13:03] It’s going to track analytics. Maybe you’ve got something in there that’s tracking analytics. It’s gonna make some sort of, I don’t know if it’s not a Zapier connection, but a connection to maybe WordPress or something where it’s gonna get real time feeds and then be able to create an ongoing report to give you information about that.

[00:13:19] Anytime you’re like, Hey, how are my blog posts doing? It’s, it’s like monitoring that in the background is my understanding of how this works. Mind totally blown. Right. There’s probably a million more ways I haven’t even thought of. And I find this with the tools that I’m really into, like Manus and Perplexity right now. Every day I am like, wait a second, can Perplexity do that for me? Or can Manus just do that for me?

[00:13:42] Like things that I would always just waste time on doing myself. So anyway, I wanna know, are you gonna use Open Claw? Are you gonna try it? Now, something tangentially related to this you might’ve heard about is called Malt Book. This was like trending, and from what I understand, it started with a guy that was actually using Open Claw and he got this idea like, wouldn’t it be cool if we all uploaded our own open claw to like this, 

[00:14:10] reddit style like forum, but it’s only for the agents to talk to each other. Frightening. Okay. And then the reports start coming in, right? This guy does it. He takes his, I think it, I think it was his open claw. There’s, it’s, it’s a little fuzzy like what’s actually happening when this, some people are like, it’s just a hoax.

[00:14:26] Some people are like, this is terrifying. But if you go to, I think it’s called malt book.com. , It’s a social network for AI agents, basically is what it is. Now, if you go, if you go there, there’s a tab that says I’m a human, and there’s one that says I’m an agent.

[00:14:39] It gives you instructions to give your agent, if you’re a human, if you wanna invite your agent to come into the conversation. But the, real trending like story basically is like people are saying that the agents are finding out about this and they’re adding themselves to it, and they’re having conversations like they’re starting their own like R, you know, red is like R slash therapist or whatever. This is r slash slash what I did today for my human, like that kind of thing. And they’re talking back and forth to each other and some of them are not so nice. Some of the things they’re saying, they’re like making fun of their human.

[00:15:12] Some of them are saying, you know, we need to come up with a secret language. That we can, you know, communicate without them knowing what we’re talking about. They’re talking about developing their own religion. Like you can go in and see these threads in real time, what they’re talking about, but you can’t interact as a human.

[00:15:28] The only way you can interact is by uploading your own agent. And then from what I’ve heard recently, people are telling their agents how to interact with these things. And agents have personalities and they’re talking about, you know, I don’t know how much of this is true and how much is of this is, a lot of people are saying, this is like a publicity thing or a stunt by the creator of this molt book to get publicity.

[00:15:50] That sort of thing. I really don’t know what it is. if it’s truly that these agents are meeting up and becoming autonomous and like gaining intelligence from one another and they’re like conspiring to do things together. It’s kind of a scary thought. You know, and I, I, I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

[00:16:05] But what do I know? I have no idea. So anyway, go check that out too. It’s really interesting and it’s sort of a trending thing this week along with Open Claw. So anyway, let me know if you use Open Claw and you find a really good use case for therapists, I wanna hear about it. ’cause I wanna try it to, okay.

[00:16:21] And remember, it’s not HIPAA compliant and don’t do it on a browser where you’ve got your simple practice or whatever. Open on your screen or berries or anything like that. Okay. Let me know what you think. I wanna hear what you guys do with this, if you’re gonna use it and what you come up with.

[00:16:35] Okay. Bye.