AI Agents and the Orchestration Layer for Startups
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📝 Worried that AI agents will eat your startup? Start here Investors are worried that AI agents will replace software rather than enhance it. If agents can do the work, why buy the workflow? That’s why the stock market has been selling software stocks: SaaS tools that help humans might get displaced by AI systems that do the job outright, like OpenClaw. TWiST asked OpenClaw foundation member, entrepreneur, and investor Dave Morin about the concern and what he counsels startups to do in the face of a rapidly changing technology market. What is Morin's mental model to help founders understand what will be accelerated by OpenClaw and agentic AI, and what will be consumed by it? Morin thinks founders should build at "the orchestration layer" as much as possible and focus on creating unique data that isn't trained into the major models. What does that look like in practice? Morin said he's investing in robotics companies by asking the diligence question: "Is this robot creating a distinctly new data set that only it would know?" The same concept applies to software products. You do not want to build something that relies on off-the-shelf intelligence to solve a problem without generating proprietary data. Why? Because all you have in that case is a workflow that can be oneshotted by either an AI lab or an agentic product like OpenClaw with an off-the-shelf model in its brain. That's why building "your standard vertical co-pilot AI for XYZ is getting pretty dangerous," Morin explained. The good news is that building agents is still fertile ground for founders. There will be "a lot of innovation" around crafting agents for narrow tasks, or replicating entire human employees in Morin's view, which means that there's plenty of market uncertainty in the agentic realm for founders to conquer and monetize. Just don't build an agent for a task that you know nothing about. Morin thinks that founders should build against work that they "uniquely know." http://x.com/i/article/20289234675472670…