OpenClaw, Copilot, and the Difference Between Personal Tools and Enterprise Platforms
Over the weekend I played around with OpenClaw. Built skills, created a Graz assistant (if you want to try it, search for “grazy” on ClawHub), just explored what’s possible. Right now I’m tinkering with a diary skill that checks what happened during the day across my OpenClaw chats and summarizes it. And the building itself just happens in a Telegram chat with OpenClaw, on the couch, Netflix running in the background. I started coding with TurboPascal over 25 years ago, what’s happening right now was science fiction in 1998.
Since the ZIB2 interview with the OpenClaw creator, quite a few relatives and friends have reached out. “You do something with AI, right?” And I’m realizing that in all the excitement, people are missing the bigger picture.
OpenClaw is a personal agent. Runs locally, on my machine, for me. Peter Steinberger said exactly that when he was on with Armin Wolf. A playground project that blew up. Not an enterprise solution. And he was honest about it: if you don’t understand the risks, better wait a little longer.
Microsoft Copilot is something different. Not better, not worse, but a fundamentally different approach. Copilot isn’t a tool you install somewhere. It lives inside the system an organization already works in. Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, the permissions, the governance, the data. It acts in the context of my work and that gives it different access, but it also has to meet very different standards.
The distinction I think matters more than any feature comparison: personal tool vs. enterprise platform. OpenClaw, ChatGPT, Claude. Great tools for my own productivity. And there will always be room for expert systems beyond the Microsoft ecosystem, that’s always been the case and AI won’t be any different.
But when I think about how 500 or 5,000 people in an organization become more productive, you need something that lives in the existing infrastructure. That understands governance. That you can roll out and manage. And sure, every major vendor will build some form of agent management. Whether they’ll all match the charm of OpenClaw, local, open, no guardrails, I doubt it. Enterprise and “unhinged” just don’t go well together.
When I compare this to Copilot Studio or Declarative Agents right now, OpenClaw with its openness and seemingly limitless possibilities is obviously a dream for any tinkerer. But that’s exactly the point. I’m guessing all of this is already the warm-up for the Microsoft AI Tour in Munich next week. Probably I’m unconsciously preparing for the “But Copilot can’t do that” questions. Or actually, with this post, quite consciously.
