The Innovation podcast
The Innovation Podcast explores the ideas, technologies, and people shaping the future. From artificial intelligence and groundbreaking startups to business strategy, entrepreneurship, and emerging trends, each episode delivers practical insights and inspiring conversations.
Whether you're an entrepreneur, tech enthusiast, student, or lifelong learner, you'll discover fresh perspectives, expert interviews, and actionable ideas to help you stay ahead in a rapidly changing world.
The Innovation podcast
AI Agents run my business and life
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What happens when AI agents handle your daily tasks, automate your business, and boost your productivity around the clock? In this episode, we explore how AI agents are transforming the way entrepreneurs, creators, and professionals work and live.
Discover real-world use cases, the best AI agent tools, and practical strategies for automating repetitive tasks, managing workflows, creating content, conducting research, and making smarter decisions. Learn the benefits, limitations, and future potential of AI-powered assistants—and how you can start building your own AI-driven system today.
Today's episode is an inside look to how Andrew Wilkinson is using AI agents to run his personal and business life. This is a guy who has a great setup. He shows us exactly how he's using things like OpenClaw and AI agents to be more productive and to make more money. How he uses it with his family office. How he's using it to start a startup. How he's using it to think about where the next generation business is and where he should be putting his money. This is an inside look, and I don't think he shared this anywhere with how he's using AI agents to run his life and his businesses. By the end of this episode, you're gonna have your creative juices flowing. I certainly did, and I can't wait to see you in there. Andrew Wilkinson, I think third time on the pod. Welcome back. Good to have you. Andrew, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?
SPEAKER_00Oh man. Um, they're gonna learn that open claw is uh hard um but amazing when it works. Um they're gonna learn uh whether they have ADHD or OCD. Uh they're gonna learn how to build a crazy vector database about their complex company. Um and they're gonna learn a few prompt tricks uh and whatever random other stuff we end up stumbling into.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so for those of you who don't know, Andrew's a very curious guy and he gets deep into rabbit holes. So it sounds like what we're gonna learn is a lot about how you're using AI in your day-to-day, the the good, the bad, the ugly, uh, and everything in between.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, let's do it.
SPEAKER_01All right, let's get into it.
SPEAKER_00I would say I had this crazy moment like so many other people in December of last year, where I'd played with Cloud Code and all the AI tools, like Replit and stuff, and they could kind of do stuff. It was interesting, but it wasn't uh it wasn't there yet. And in December of 2025, I just literally like I feel like I started shooting heroin. Um, I started waking up at three or four in the morning, rolling out of bed with a big smile on my face, and literally just sitting in terminal and clawed code with 10 tabs open. Uh, and I've been doing that ever since. And my goal, um, you know, I've had a bunch of different things I've been trying to do uh on the productivity side. Like I was basically trying to build an open claw agent uh before open claw came out and doing a very poor job of it. So I was excited um when I was able to do that. But I mostly have been excited as a business person. Um, for those of you uh the listeners that don't know, I basically buy and start businesses. I mostly start businesses as a hobby for fun, um, but I buy a lot of businesses. And I'm always astounded by the amount of administrative burden in uh you know a SaaS company. If you think about how it scales, um, you know, support, accounting, there's all these like very boring rote um types of tasks that are now able to be automated. And so as a test, before I started doing this in our operating businesses, I basically built a business, um, a SaaS business, and then I've been running it entirely autonomously using OpenClaw. Um, so that's probably a cool place to start. And I just want to say, like with OpenClaw, um I basically have been, we we referenced heroin a moment ago. Um, you know, I have never done heroin, just in case anyone's concerned about me. But um apparently when you do heroin, the first time is the best time. And they call it chasing the dragon. You're trying to get back to that special moment. And I had this special moment. I was traveling, I went to Arizona on a trip, and I forgot to bring my laptop. Um, but I'd set up an OpenClaw agent on my computer, and I basically was able to run my entire business using OpenClaw in the back of Ubers. Like I was going to this conference, it was super, super busy, and I was astounded by how competent it was able to be. Um, and that nobody picked up on the fact that you know every single email that I wrote was being written by OpenClaw. And so I've been chasing that moment ever since. Uh, and the problem is that I feel like I'm spending 50% of my time debugging it and 50% of my time, maybe 30% of my time making it better, and then 20% of my time being productive. So it's like the classic productivity treadmill. Um, but we have been able to build some pretty interesting stuff. Um, so let me let me screen share with you and I will show you this app that I built. Um so this all started because I uh I wanted to build a custom GPT uh or Chat GPT project for me and my girlfriend's relationship. The idea would be that we would be able to query it, hey, we're having a fight about XYZ. Um, what should we do? And I asked it, I said, um, hey, if I was to do a bunch of psychological tests, which ones would you want to see? And it gave me this list of like 15 different screens that it wanted me to do. And so I went to Claude Code and I said, Hey, can you just put all these into a multiple choice test, set up scoring, and then put them in a JSON file? And so both of us did that. It took about 40 minutes, and we put the JSON files into ChatGPT and we said, without knowing anything about this couple, um, tell us about their relationship. And we read it line by line, and like our jaws just like dropped. Like it nailed every single fight that we have, every single issue at home. Um, and so I saw the power of these multiple choice personality tests. And so I, you know, saw the product opportunity and I was like, I'm gonna build a business out of this. And so I started this thing called Deep Personality. Let me just share my screen here.
SPEAKER_01Quick break in the pod to let you know about a free workshop I'm doing that answers some of your biggest questions. The first is in the AI age, what are some categories that are ripe for startup ideas? I'm gonna outline a bunch of those different categories, the ones that I think the most opportunity is. Second, is there's a million AI tools out there, which are the ones that matter when I'm trying to build a business? I'll walk you through that. And lastly, how do you actually build a business with some of these AI tools? So I'm actually gonna show you live how I do this with my ideabrowser.com team, and I can't wait to see you there. It's this Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern. And if you go to the show notes, if you go to the description, you can click a link, RSVP, and learn a few things. I hope it'll get your creative juices flowing, and I'll see you back at the pod. And you know, you could have, you know, you owe you you own an agency called Meta Lab, you could have called out MetaLab to go and build this for you, but you decided I'm gonna do this all myself. I'm gonna actually productize this myself, I'm gonna design it myself, I'm gonna build it myself. Why did you make that decision?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think um I love people, like I'm very extroverted, but the worst part about business is people. Um, you know, if you think about using a let's use a screenwriting analogy. So in Hollywood, there's all these brilliant screenwriters and they write these incredible scripts. And so they have this idea and they know where they want it to go, right? So let's say they start here and they want it to go here. They want to make an incredible feature film. In between all in between the script and the feature film are a hundred people that they have to convince, $50 million they have to raise, uh, a million middlemen and all that. And I think that creativity is just um compromised based on how the number of people between your vision uh and execution. And so um I think like writing for me has been a very like pure pursuit where I can think about it and I can write it and I can work with the AI to make it better if I need to. Um, but it feels it feels like so clear, such a clear um execution of your vision. And I feel like vibe coding is that. Um, like finally, I can do absolutely every part of it and I can do it at my own pace. You know, if I was using employees, um, they're unreliable, they don't see my vision, they don't understand every aspect of um design. So you can have a great designer who sucks at front end, or you can have um or doesn't know how to design something that'll work in a front end, you can have a great designer who doesn't know how to write copy. So there's just all these pieces that come together with vibe coding. And basically, like in a few manic days, I was able to build this pretty crazy app. So let me let me show you um how it works. So basically, you do a personality test and it takes about 40 minutes. You're just clicking multiple choice answers and stuff, and then you get this report. And so here's my archetype. So it'll be like you're the blazing architect, um, here's your superpowers, here's your kryptonite. Uh, this is just like the basic. And then um, as you scroll, you can see the AI has taken all of your answers and it's written like a hundred-page report. So this report literally goes on and on and on and on, and it's written like Robert Green. So it's like super impactful and deep and hits you. Um, and it basically walks you through what you're great at and what you're terrible at, what job you should have. Um, is your relationship working for you? Do you have ADHD, OCD? Are are you on the spectrum? Like all these different things. And so you can see, let me get oh my god, it's so big, all the way to the bottom. Um, so you can see like these are my kind of personality traits, my attachment style, um, my internal family systems, like how much I people please, all this stuff. So I built this thing, and usually what happens for me is I start something and then I don't want to finish it because I don't want to hire the people and deal with it. And so what I ended up doing is in this case, um, just building agents to do everything. And so I can show you we're we were using OpenCloud. We're currently using this thing called Harbor that a friend of mine built. Um, and it's basically a harness for agents. So you can see all the different agents that are running here. So we have a dev, we have a marketing agent, and then we have a support agent. And basically the way it works is um somebody emails support, and uh either support just tackles the ticket uh or it will actually fix the ticket. So it'll sell send it to the dev agent. If it's a P0, so like a super scary security breach, it'll just immediately fix it and merge the PR. Otherwise, it'll uh we just wake up and have a bunch of PRs. Um, and then it'll email the person back and be like, hey, I fixed your issue or whatever it is. That works basically perfectly. Like it's shocking. Like support to me is not a job very, very soon. Um, the one that's really exciting is the marketing agent. So we basically have it, uh it's hooked into post hoc, so it has all the data for the app. And it actually manages a meta and Reddit ads account. And so it'll um do multivariate testing, it'll create ad creative, it will set budgets, and we basically just message it and we'll say, um, you know, hey, can you increase the budget by $1,000? Or we approve like a big SEO project or something like that. So where we're at with it is like we've done maybe like $20,000 of revenue. Like it's still small. And where I'm really excited um to go next is like what happens when we give it like a hundred thousand dollar a month ad budget and we find ads and creative that actually work. Um so that's been that's been insane. Um and I think that we're probably three to six months out from being able to just uh hand businesses off to AI to run at least basic businesses like this.
SPEAKER_01Harbor I've never heard of. And I see I see a lot of stuff.
SPEAKER_00Let me um let me just ask. So it's my friend Gavin made it. Yeah. Um yeah, it's Harbor.
SPEAKER_01It reminds me a little bit of Paperclip. Have you seen Paperclip?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I have. So this is it. It's GitHub slash geek for brains slash harbor. Um and uh he's he's a friend of mine that I've been working on this with. And uh it's it's working really well. We just found that open claw wasn't quite deterministic enough. And the other issue with open claw is because it's a text-based interface, it was a little bit hard to keep track of all the agents and what's actually happening. Um, so it's worked really well for us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, I think what's cool about it is like if you're starting a company and you're thinking about org charts, roles, responsibilities, you know, you don't think about it within within text, you know, back and forth, right? You think about it as like, okay, I'm gonna spin up this agent or employee to do XYZ. And then how can I monitor what that XYZ employee is doing?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like so basically, like it's just a this is just a GUI, basically, for something like OpenClaw. And it's still running on Cloud. Um, but you know, you have all these documents with uh kind of like a knowledge base, you've got databases, you have all your environmental variables, etc. It's like it's very similar to paperclip. Um, I think the problem, it reminds me a little bit of crypto, where crypto is not crypto is built by nerds, so they make it nerdy. And when I saw paperclip, I got so excited because I was like, oh my god, I can this makes sense to me visually. You like have this org chart, but it's clearly built by nerds because it's very confusing. And so my I mean, my kind of belief is like pretty soon anthropic and uh open AI are gonna launch like basically like CEOs. So you just be like, I'm just gonna hire a CEO for my company, give me your data, I'll figure it out, I'll run it, I'll run the whole business. And it right now, the problem I feel I feel like um, you know, two years ago it was like uh we're you get you get five minutes with a super genius who has Alzheimer's. Like the context window is so small that you just have these brief moments. Now I feel like with the the one million context window, um, they can like maybe remember a day, but it's like memento, right? Um, and I feel like once the context window is like five million, ten million, then we'll be able to run entire companies with this.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. There's some people now selling autonomous companies. I don't know if you've seen this. Pulsia is one of those companies. I think Pulsia PO.
SPEAKER_00Does anyone go work? Like I saw that New York Times story about that guy who like started the autonomous uh, you know, what is it like billion dollar business or whatever? But and obviously that's real. New York Times is writing about it, but I I can't parse what's real versus bullshit.
SPEAKER_01I think you know, we're recording this April 29th, 2026. You cannot run a fully autonomous company right now that yeah, that is going to get better, that you can just like you know, go hang out on the beach 24-7. That being said, I think there's parts of the business that can be autonomous, like support is like a good part, you know, area, but like you're not gonna outsource like product at this point, in my opinion, autonomously to something like Pulsia today. You know, maybe that changes in six months, 12 months, whatever. But like my take is the people that are selling autonomous companies today are just selling a dream.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I kind of agree. Like, I think um open claw agents are still like zap, they're basically like zap your zaps, but that can make basic decisions and have intelligence. But you still have to tell them step by step, this is how I want you to think, this is how I want you to operate. Like, let's say you hired an intern and you gave them an email address, you would never have to say, you should check your email every 15 minutes and you should reply. And when you do reply, you should, you know, think about the following things. Like it feels very, it's like you're dealing with a baby, a genius baby, but you have to teach them how to do every single thing. Where I'm excited is when I can just have a model that's just like a CEO model or or and just like delegate to them and they'll just figure it out, which I think is kind of what everyone acted like OpenClaw was, but it's totally not.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I want to go back to go to the deep personality test. Can I give you unprompted feedback?
SPEAKER_00For sure.
SPEAKER_01So when you were going through this, I was like, like the content looked exceptional. My my you know, my issue in general with like vibe-coded projects is that because anyone could, you know, create apps and products like this, it's almost like you need to have some credibility layer in order to listen to the content. You know what I mean? So like um, you know, if I was like the you know, PM or CEO on this, I would be like, how can I partner with you know someone who's credible in the space such that when I get this you know output, this report, I'm gonna take this seriously.
SPEAKER_00I think part of the problem is it's anyone who is a psychologist or um someone who would be like legit on this would never do it because it's a bit cheeky. Like I'm using um psychological screens that are supposed to be interpreted by a psychologist, but I'm not a psychologist, I'm using AI to do it. And I think it's incredibly accurate. Like I've I've hammered it on a million different models and I've looked at um example tests and stuff, but that is definitely an issue. If there's someone listening who's connected to like a Jay Shetty type person, definitely let me know because I think it's perfect for that. Um, it really is one of those like one plus one equals five kind of things. But yeah, right now it's what I realized is like I can when I post this in my newsletter, it goes crazy viral for a bit, but I don't have enough pull in that space where my audience is a bunch of like tech bros. They're not gonna, you know, they're not gonna share this with all their friends and stuff. It does definitely need something like that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I I I also wonder like, you know, I think about like who, like what are influencers, celebrities, micro celebrities that people look up to, like a couple, like even just a couple that like has gone through this publicly, maybe and have come out of the other side and they're just happier. And when people think of like, you know, a couple that's you know, a dream couple, like this is their, you know, they're involved in this in some capacity.
SPEAKER_00That's smart. So you and your wife, you want to do it? Should we do it? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I mean, my wife is like very like uh private, you know. So I'm more of the public one, uh, but I'll see what I can do.
SPEAKER_00Same as my girlfriend, she hates hates publicity and stuff. Um let's see what else can I show you? Um, I mean, another big piece is just data. So I, you know, I feel really frustrated because at different times I've kind of standardized on different LLMs, like I'll get into the cloud ecosystem and I'll use the desktop app, I'll use ChatGPT and I'll build out a bunch of projects. I've basically just accepted that I'm gonna live in cloud code until somebody builds her, um, which I'm sure is coming in the next couple years. Um, and so my strategy has basically been um to take all the different data pipelines that I have and put them into a centralized place. And so I have um Fireflies record all my meetings. Um every night a cron goes in to the API, builds an M markdown file, puts it into Gbrain. Um I've built out vector databases um for my businesses. This is a really cool um thing. So, you know, a vector database can store um, you know, millions and millions and millions of tokens, and you can basically um you can basically have like a service like Pinecone go and crunch through a large amount of data, and it basically makes it highly searchable for an LLM. And so I can show you an example of that. Let me just switch the screen sharing. So, okay, so here's an example. So like I did um I trained a vector database on my family office, Folly Partners, which is basically just my like personal holding company. And here I just asked it, uh, what did I say? Um break down how many minority venture investments I've made and how many are in the money, bankrupt or declined. And basically it went off and did this query. And then boom, I can see that I've made 132 direct investments. I invested 16 million, it's now worth 36 million, and then it can break down all the different write-offs, everything. And so this has been um really, really powerful. So, like if you think about, I did it for tiny as well. And in tiny, I have uh, man, 24 businesses or something like that, tons of historical data. And the challenge when you run a conglomerate is like, I don't know it. Like, are any of the companies spending too much money? Are any of the CEOs full of shit? Um, are any of the businesses trending up, down, expenses are going up? It's just too much data for one person to understand. And so I can't show it because it's all public company data. But basically, what I can do in Tiny now is I can say, hey, review the last quarter and I want you to give me any icebergs or issues, or I can ask a simple question like, how many accounting staff do we have in head office? Um, or whatever. And I've found this so useful. It's not perfect. Like it'll it'll often like say the wrong person is CEO of a business or the numbers are a bit off. But in terms of being able to like be the eye of Sauron inside your company, I think it's like incredibly powerful.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. And and curious, like within Tiny, like I I see how you're using it to interface with Tiny and and to you know be a better chairperson and give advice.