ISSUE 22 · ME+MACHINE
Back in February I hired myself a staff: five AI teammates, each with a name, a personality file, and a job. There was Lucario, the health coach, and Alakazam, the executive coach. Getting the team running took me the entire day. And then several more days after that, because my setup kept breaking down. Then a bug froze the whole system, and I never quite got to use them.
The software I was fighting with is called OpenClaw, a free tool for creating AI teammates that you text from your regular messaging apps, and that do real tasks on a computer: reading and organizing your files, browsing the web, running jobs on a schedule. The catch is that you have to install everything, wire it to your apps, and keep your computer switched on around the clock for it to work.
The OpenClaw docs are upfront about who they’re for: "developers and power users." I'm neither, and it was not easy to use. But while my wiring didn't quite hold up, the blueprint did.
Gizmo & Co., my new AI team.
Last week, I hired new staff using Grok Bot, and so far, I’ve found Grok Bot to be more intuitive to use than ChatGPT or Claude, and way simpler than OpenClaw. (Before this starts sounding like an ad: the drawbacks are coming.)
You create a bot, give it a short name and one clear job, and message it the way you'd text a coworker, meaning it’s the same teammate today as it is tomorrow. You have one conversation that keeps going, not a new chat for every task. Plus, there's no workflow builder to learn and nothing to install on your own machine; it all runs on a computer in their cloud.
You don't have to stop at one teammate, either. That was the part I had right back in February. Grok's docs say to give each bot a clear outcome to own, and to add another only when there's enough steady work for a specialist. I started with a Chief of Staff and as our conversation unfolded, gave it permission to create a new teammate for new jobs, and to manage them itself. I'm at eighteen bots after one week, though I only talk to a few of them (the rest report to my other bots, not to me directly).
You can text the bots from your phone too, and they keep working after you close your laptop. One of my favorite parts is watching them talk to each other. When one hands work to the next, the handoff shows up in the chat. And you can even put a few of them in a group chat, just like having real teammates in a room.
I've also hooked the team up to my Notion workspace, where each bot keeps its own tasks and databases updated. I love this part. The task tracking that used to happen invisibly in the background of an AI chat now lives on pages I can watch.
In a real business, hiring is expensive and managing people comes with the territory. With AI teammates, the math flips: extra hires cost nothing, and your attention becomes the payroll. Even xAI's own tips read like a management handbook: too many parallel handoffs create duplicate work, so give every stage a single owner. Or as one early reviewer put it, "You are not prompting a model anymore, you are supervising staff."
Grok Bots have lots of drawbacks too (as promised). The most prominent complaint I see about Grok Bot online is the security risks of a shared computer. Your teammates all share a single computer, and there's no way to hand a login to just one of them. Anything you give one bot, all eighteen can reach, including the ones I never talk to. So I'd keep anything sensitive out of their hands for now.
The bigger issue for me, though, is that you can't (easily) pick the model doing the work, and the one under the hood isn't as smart as what I'm used to in Claude and ChatGPT. For example, I normally generate my images with Flora.ai (which is connected via MCP to Claude), and while the exact image takes some trial and error, they eventually come out right. With Grok Bot, I spent over an hour going back and forth with my image bot Smeargle, and we never got close to a usable picture of Gizmo. Normally I'd just switch to a better model for the job. But here, there's no easy switching.
And Grok Bot keeps ignoring my instructions too. Part of that, I think, is that I can't set it up the way I’m used to. With Claude or ChatGPT, I keep instruction files on my desktop, carry them between the two, and build complex workflows on top of them. With Grok Bot, the instructions go in each bot's profile, which is a box inside their app, not files I own. That's enough for a bot with one simple job. But my desktop files build on each other, and one edit updates every workflow that uses them. If Grok Bot has a way to work like that, I haven't found it yet.
To top it all off, at the end of the day, Grok Bot provides a rented staff. If I ever want to leave, I can't take my team with me. I could copy and paste their job descriptions out, but everything else stays behind: the memory of every task we've done together, the files piled up on their computer, the corrections that taught them how I like things. If I go anywhere else, I'd be starting over with eighteen strangers.
Where I landed. This is not an ad or an endorsement; nobody paid me anything to write this, I'm just excited after a week of experimenting. Whether it makes sense for you depends on what you'd be trading in. If you've already built serious AI workflows, keep them, because Grok Bot can't yet run them at the sophistication you'd need.
In a June survey of small-business workers, 64% said they mainly use AI for drafting, summarizing, and brainstorming in one-off chats. If that's you, you're not giving anything up, and this is a very intuitive and fun way to work. The question is whether it's worth $200 a month when ChatGPT and Claude have much cheaper tiers.
I love the mental model, I can see the potential in it, and it's only been out a week. Maybe I'll figure more of it out with time, maybe the team behind it makes it better, or maybe Claude and ChatGPT copy the idea and build their own versions. For now, though, I won’t be giving up any of my other AI subscriptions for Grok Bot.
THE 30-SECOND VERSION
The mental model of AI work is shifting from a new chat for every task to a standing bot for every job.
One job per AI bot. Add a second bot when the work earns a specialist, not before.
The economics inverted: while additional AI bots are free, your attention is the new payroll.
If you're newer to AI and fine with spending $200 a month, start with something like Grok Bot. It’s easy to set up and intuitive to use. If you already run deep complex workflows, your current setup still wins, for now.
If you do try Grok Bot, keep anything sensitive out of its hands: every AI teammate on your account shares a single computer.
The five AI teammates I set up in February weren't a bad idea, just early. The wiring finally caught up, and I'm rooting for it to catch up the rest of the way. As for me: I went from five (dysfunctional) teammates to eighteen (mostly functional) teammates in a week, so it's possible I got excited and went slightly overboard with my hiring spree.
me+machine.