Innovate26 Summit · April 2026

More Time
for People

Your agent starter guide — from the session by Brian Davis at Life Pacific University

Digital Director, ONE&ALL Church

The Concept

What Is an Agent?

You probably already own one. A robot vacuum has every trait of an AI agent.

Role Based
Its job is to vacuum. Not mop, not cook. One job, does it well.
Persistent Memory
Maps your house. Remembers the layout next time.
Scheduled or Triggered
Runs at 2pm every day, or when you tap the button.
Uses Tools
Brushes, suction, sensors, charging dock.
Autonomous
Navigates obstacles, picks its own path, returns to charge when done.

You've had an agent in your house for years. Now imagine one for your work.

The Framework

The Agent Ladder

Four levels of AI agents — from a texting assistant to a full operations team. You pick where to start.

4
PaperClip / OpenClaw
Build your own agent team. Open source, self-hosted. Maximum control over your operations.
3
Manus / Perplexity Computer
Fully autonomous. Give it a goal, walk away. Starting at $17/mo.
2
ChatGPT / Claude
Conversational AI with powerful new agent modes.
ChatGPT Agent Mode — runs a virtual computer, browses, fills forms, builds spreadsheets.
Claude Dispatch — text from your phone, it completes tasks on your desktop.
Both adopted OpenClaw-like features in the last month.
1
Poke
Lives in iMessage and WhatsApp. Sends your schedule, filters email. Zero setup.
Start here
Take Action

Try One Thing This Week

You don't need to build an agent team. Just hand off one thing.

Option 1
Let Poke Run Your Morning
It reads your email and calendar overnight. You wake up to a text with your day planned, priorities flagged, and conflicts surfaced.
Option 2
Give Claude a Project
Not a question — a job. "Research these 3 vendors, compare pricing, and write me a recommendation." Walk away. Come back to a finished deliverable.
Option 3
Let ChatGPT Handle a Workflow
Agent mode: point it at a dashboard, tell it to pull last month's numbers and build you a summary. It drives the browser for you.
The Top Rung

Build Your Own

Open source tools for running your own agent team.

Agent Orchestration
PaperClip
Agent teams running locally. Specialized roles, orchestrated workflows. Each agent has a job.
What Brian uses daily
Self-Hosted Agents
OpenClaw
MIT licensed. 247K+ GitHub stars. Your own agents on your own server.
Total cost: $4–27/mo
Resources

Tools Mentioned

Poke
→
Lives in iMessage and WhatsApp. Connects to your calendar, email, and tasks — texts you proactive help without switching apps.
poke.com
ChatGPT
→
Agent Mode breaks goals into subtasks and runs them unsupervised — filling forms, analyzing spreadsheets, navigating websites. Schedule repeating work daily or weekly.
chatgpt.com
Claude
→
Send it a task from your phone and come back to finished work on your desktop. Claude can see your screen, click buttons, and use any app — no APIs needed.
claude.ai
Manus
→
Goes beyond answering questions to autonomously building websites, drafting presentations, conducting research, and executing entire workflows end-to-end.
manus.im
Perplexity Computer
→
Routes tasks to 19 different AI models for best-fit execution. Creates subagents for complex problems and maintains memory across months-long projects.
perplexity.ai
PaperClip
→
Orchestrate multiple AI agents with specialized roles — each with its own responsibilities, working together as a team. Runs locally on your machine.
paperclipai.com
OpenClaw
→
Self-hosted AI agents on your own server. Open source, MIT licensed. Manages email, calendars, files, and browser tasks autonomously — all under your control.
openclaw.ai
The Signal

What Leaders Are Saying

These aren't predictions. They're descriptions of what's already happening — from the people building it.

Sam Altman
CEO, OpenAI · February 2026
"The future is going to be extremely multi-agent."
Jensen Huang
CEO, NVIDIA · GTC March 2026
"75,000 employees working with 7.5 million agents. 100 AI workers for every person."
Satya Nadella
CEO, Microsoft · WEF Davos 2026
"All of us are going to be managers of infinite minds."
Andrej Karpathy
OpenAI Co-founder · March 2026
"I haven't typed a line of code since December. I'm in a state of psychosis trying to figure out what's possible."