Just like that, summer is almost over, and it’s back-to-school season already. I’ve been away from writing in this journal, but I have been building. I’m about to complete REMAX Hallmark’s real estate brokerage website. I’ve done a couple of other website builds as well. And I hired a new assistant. Several, actually. A small team at a cost of $10 a day.
Meet: Grok Bot. If you’ve ever dabbled with Open Claw or Hermes, Grok Bot is that. Except it’s a simpler, user friendly, no roll-up-your-sleeves hard core technical setup required. You don’t need a Mac Mini let alone a dedicated computer for it to run. It’s just an app on your computer or mobile device. And you don’t need a separate chat app to talk to it. It is the app.
Setup is super easy. Download the desktop app or mobile app (I have both, and you should too). Then start building your agents. Yes, it’s that easy.
Except I did it backwards.
Before we dive into technical stuff, anyone reading this who has no idea with Open Claw or Hermes is, or doesn’t know what agentic AI is, here’s a simple explanation.
When ChatGPT came out, you met your LLM chatbot. You had conversations back and forth. It helped you with work, maybe. And it entertained you. Purely conversational. It shared information with you. It told you what you needed to know. But it couldn’t do stuff for you. (Well, aside from create graphics, write up your reports, and tell you how to do things.)
Agentic AI is the next level – where your LLM chatbot can now tell a harness (think of it as a body with arms that can do stuff) what to do. Build your app. Create your website. Monitor things for you. Do research and send an email out based on its findings. Create and implement your ad campaign. All sorts of stuff.
Open Claw and Hermes were among the first for this type of agentic AI use. But it was complicated to setup. I struggled with my Open Claw setup, and eventually got Hermes working. It ran on my gaming PC (yes I have one of those, LOL). And I interacted with it via Telegram. When I’m at my office, I’d be sending messages to it through Telegram telling it what to do.
But… the computer had to be on for it to do anything, it required a very technical setup, and you had to know what you were doing (or at least ask another AI to help you) to get anything done with it.
Enter Grok Bot. Your agentic AI assistant. Where you can spin up multiple bots to do various things for you. Go to https://x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot, download the app, and get running.
You need a paid subscription to Super Grok or Cursor in order to get this to work. Choose one, or the other. (I had signed up to the base of one, ran out and signed up to the base of the other… and no, it doesn’t work that way.) Either paid subscription is fine. Right now I’m just using Cursor.
Download the mobile app so you can communicate to Grok Bot on your phone while you’re away from your computer. You can literally turn off your computer and keep communicating via your phone. It picks up wherever you left off, in true sync.
Now here’s how you set it up properly… but first, how I did it wrong and backwards.
What I did was start creating individual bots for various things I wanted the agentic AI assistant to do for me. Check my emails. Write a draft if it knew the context and answer. Monitor flights for upcoming conferences. Monitor hotels for these conferences. Scan and share real estate news.
A video editor. Content creator. Digital marketing bot. Data nerd to analyze research and data. A schedule bot to plan my appointments on my calendar. A talent scout to hire people. A business development bot. And a general computer use bot.
I had created half of these, and started interacting with them before realizing I made more work for myself than what I had anticipated. It’s like hiring a whole bunch of employees, and me being their direct report.
No, no, no. I didn’t want this.
I realized my mistake and why I had built this backwards.
So I quickly created a Chief of Staff bot, and told it to make the other bots its subordinates. You’re the boss now, Chief of Staff.
So here’s the correct way YOU should use Grok Bot and get started with building your own agentic AI assistants to do anything you want for you.
Start with a Chief of Staff. Your Chief of Staff is the boss. The go-to person. Your single link to all the other bots. It’s the boss that creates the other bots and tells them what to do, based on your requirements.
If you start this way, you’ll be ahead.
Think of something you need done? Tell your Chief of Staff. And it’ll create that bot for you, and give it instructions.
The Chief of Staff is your Executive Assistant in real life – just imagine it that way. You tell your EA that you need something done. He or she will find a way to do it. They’ll hire the right person for it, tell that person what to do, and make sure that person reports to them.
Grok Bot works the same way.
Now that you’ve got your Chief of Staff, slowly and meticulously look at tasks that you need automated. Where you can be replaced. Tell your Chief of Staff, in granular detail, what this task is, how it should be conducted, what tools are needed to accomplish the task successfully, and let them build the bot and give instructions on how the bot should work.
You’ll start building a team of agentic AI bots to replace mundane to extraordinary tasks. You’re only limited to your imagination and thinking.
Give this a try. Let me know what you do with your Grok Bot. And I’ll share some bots I’ve built in subsequent posts.