OpenClaw is proving the next major development in the technology world, as AI’s capability moves from simple chatbots to agents that can think and act on your behalf. On Bridge talks Business, Milford Senior Analyst Andrew Curtayne discusses what OpenClaw is and how it is impacting the technology landscape.
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Bridge talks Business: 24 March 2026
Episode Transcript
Ryan Bridge
Kia ora and welcome to episode 68 of Bridge talks Business with Milford. Some are calling it the next ChatGPT. The boss of the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, says this past week it is the most popular open source project in the history of humanity. OpenClaw is the AI assistant taking the world by storm. But what does it mean for tech investors? Andrew Curtayne from Milford on that.
But first, here’s your top five business bits from the past seven days.
1. Everyone’s guessing where the Iran conflict goes next. Investors digesting news of a 48-hour ultimatum, then an apparent deal, talks underway, then Iran denies it, a lot of TBC.
2. GT and central banks this week. The focus – inflation concerns in general. They surprised the market with how hawkish their responses were, focusing on potential second round impacts from this one-off energy shock.
3. Q4 Kiwi GDP data showed more slack in the economy than predicted. Personal consumption came in softer than the RBNZ’s forecast as well. The recovery perhaps a bit patchier than first thought.
4. Speaking of the Reserve Bank, Governor this week hinting in a speech yesterday about inflation. Anna Breman saying the short lived disruption in a temporary spike in petrol prices “can and should be looked through from a monetary policy perspective, if it is unlikely to have an impact on medium term inflation”.
5. Elsewhere this week, clearly the focus remains on Iran and any off ramp potential. We get inflation data from the UK and Australia, although it’s dated now. Given how fast this feast is moving, most thoughts are dated by the time they leave your mouth.
Alright, it’s time for this week’s feature interview and let’s get the lowdown on Big Tech with Andrew Curtayne, Senior Analyst at Milford. Just a reminder, this segment is informational only and should not be considered financial advice. Andrew, welcome back to the podcast. Good to see you.
Andrew Curtayne
Hi Ryan, good to be here.
Ryan Bridge
Great to see you as always. Now, we’re going to talk about OpenClaw. Don’t worry, everyone wants to talk about OpenClaw. We’ll get to that in a second. But I just want to start, Andrew, with the market volatility that we’ve seen so far this year and AI. What’s going on here?
Andrew Curtayne
There’s been two really big themes this year. One has been AI taking another evolutionary step forward and the other being, of course, the Iran war. So we’re here to talk about more about the technology side of things. I think the market really started to change how it looked at AI earlier this year – from early to mid-January. And it was basically because AI had gone from being these chatbots which were sort of helpful. You’d ask it a question and it gives you an answer, to actually being something that is more game-changing in how you work. And this is sort of the agentic revolution of which OpenClaw fits into. But all of a sudden, people found that they were able to use AI to automate work processes – to really start saving time. This led into a massive re-pricing of the software sector. So all of a sudden, we’re used to using all these software tools and we’re used to the user interfaces. Everyone went, “Well, hold on. If agents are able to do this stuff for us, why do we even need this software? Or actually, can we go and build equivalent software but use it at a much cheaper price?” So while we’re spending, say, thousands of dollars to a company called Salesforce or while we’re paying even Microsoft, while we’re paying $60 a month per person to Microsoft, when at some point, we might not need to use this.
So you saw various software companies down sort of anywhere from 30%, 40%, 50%. It spread into non-software companies such as some financial institution companies, even insurance brokers, even legal companies started selling off, as all of a sudden everyone went, “Hold on. We may not need to pay all these people, or white-collar people, to do these jobs when an AI agent can do it”. The market probably got peak negative fear on about the 23rd of February. It’s recovered a little bit since then, but the debate is wide open for 2026.
Ryan Bridge
Right, and enters OpenClaw, which is so new that I think six months ago, the technology didn’t even exist. So well, first question is why didn’t they call it open sesame because it’s a much better name.
Andrew Curtayne
It’s a fantastic sort of story. Some Austrian developer created it and launched it in what’s called open source, so anyone can use it in about November last year. Within 100 days, it became the most liked or starred developer software tool in the world. I think you sort of track them in the developing world, you track how many stars certain products get. It exceeded the previous record and it was a product called React, which developers used to create websites. It exceeded what took it 12 years to reach that number of likes, in the space of 100 days. So the growth has been astronomical and actually the guy who found it or created it has actually been taken over by OpenAI now, so he works for them.
Ryan Bridge
What exactly is it? You said that developers love it. What’s the consumer interface like? Have you used it?
Andrew Curtayne
I personally haven’t used it, but one of my colleagues has used it. He’s sort of trialled it out, seen what all the hype is about. At the moment, let’s step back. What is OpenClaw? OpenClaw is essentially an open source software that allows you to create and manage your own AI agents. It’s the next step from taking AI agents as I was saying, or AI from something that you just talked to, but it doesn’t really do anything. This is about having an agent that actually does something for you and you train it to do what you want it to do.
Ryan Bridge
Like book a holiday.
Andrew Curtayne
Yeah, go and book of holiday. It has access to your credit card. It can go pay for things. It can go do the shopping for you. You don’t like what it does, you basically say, “No, I didn’t like that. I don’t want you to do that tomorrow when we do this. Now I’m going to change your restrictions. I’m going to teach you that that is not the right thing to do”, and then the next day it should do something better. We had a walk-through actually from an investment bank analyst who had trained up its own lobster – they call them for some reason. Your agent’s apparently called Lobsters. They trained up an AI agent that was to act like a graduate investment analyst and was to go out there and create trading strategies and improve on them over time. That person’s been running this agent for about a month, and that agent is going and reporting every single morning about what news has happened overseas, what news has happened while the actual person controlling the agent was asleep, what trade recommendations can do, and actually looking at some of the outputs that wasn’t too bad. I wouldn’t say it’s maybe quite as good as a full-fledged graduate, but it’s not far off and over time it’s going to improve. That’s just one example. I think the big step-chain is it’s going to this point when people who just use AI to talk to, now go look, we’re going to create our own virtual humans that are going to work for us. I guess effectively the possibilities from this are very wide and far ranging and have a lot of consequences on the companies that we invest in.
Ryan Bridge
Yes. This is what I want to get to, is the investors and people who are investing in technology. I know Milford obviously does, but how does it change – because this is open source and independent, so not one of the big AI or OpenAI companies creating it in some kind of lab. Does that change their value or how they’re perceived as an investment?
Andrew Curtayne
Well, yes, every company is trying to say it’s going to be a benefit to them. You tend to find this with AI that every AI company, or every company in the world is an AI winner. That’s what every company will lead you to believe. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang – I was at a conference that he was speaking at two weeks ago. Again, he spoke at the Nvidia Technology Conference last week. He was very clear to say that he thinks this is going to massively increase demand for AI. People are going to use AI more and more. It’s going to be used 24 hours, seven days a week because it can work overnight. You don’t need to be sitting there directing it like a chatbot. You’re going to give it instructions and it just works all the time.
The token demand, which is the currency that large language models that AI works on, is going to rock it exponentially. We’re actually already seeing this in the data. Token demand’s gone up about 4x in the last eight weeks alone. Theoretically, this is good for the semiconductor or the chip companies. It should be good for the likes of Nvidia or TSMC. Then it’s going to change how software companies work. Software companies are going to have to quickly adapt to this new world. They’re going to have to deploy their own AI agents, which they’re all trying to do. They’re going to have to try and capture a share of this revenue from these OpenClaw agents and make sure that they can tie it into the products they offer, and can generate what’s called consumption revenue, revenue from people using AI.
Ryan Bridge
Does that mean that when I ask it to do something, it could be influenced by whoever it’s earning money off? If I say book a holiday and House of Travel has given them some money, it will book it through there rather than through another website? Is that how you commercialise it?
Andrew Curtayne
It’s a really good question. Theoretically, you should be able to set it up to not be biased to use certain products from different companies. It should be able to be trained for what you want it to do. Ultimately, these agents are backed by the large language model. You can set it to use Claude or ChatGPT as its main, I call it the brains of intelligence behind it. Could there be biases crept into it? Could it do something that you don’t quite expect it to do? Absolutely. That’s why the security level and protection is very nascent at the moment. I don’t think you’re going to see many enterprises deploying OpenClaw agents at the moment. Nvadia is very quickly trying to address this. A key announcement they gave at the tech conference last week is that they’re releasing something called Nemo Core, which they’re saying is a security layer around these OpenClaw agents to get enterprise ready and put these guardrails in that you need to be able to deploy it in a professional environment.
Ryan Bridge
Before you go, upload all your information. Just finally, Milford, how is Milford positioning itself from a portfolio perspective, given all that you’ve just discussed?
Andrew Curtayne
It’s not a straightforward market at the moment. As I said at the start, we’ve got the Iran war going on the one hand and we have the AI disruption theme going on the other hand. To be honest, at the moment, the thing that’s sort of dominating our portfolio position is actually Iran because that has some pretty big near-term tail risks.
For example, war escalates, ground troops deployed on the ground in Iran. We could see oil at $150 or potentially $200. That’s going to have a more significant direct impact on markets. We’re focusing on that first and then the second hand, we’re focusing on what it means from the AI perspective. Technology has taken a little bit of a backseat for the moment, but if I just give a high-level view on the tech positioning. We remain pretty positive on the chip stocks because they benefit from the increased token demand that these agents are causing. We remain a little bit cautious on software stocks, which have been somewhat disrupted or let’s say our certainty of earnings outlook for software companies is far lower than it used to be. We’ve been selective in which companies were putting money there. We’re trying to stay away from companies where we think charge too much for their software product and people are going to try and find AI alternatives to them. Then we’re just being very careful in other businesses which we think have white-collar workforces which could be disrupted, but it’s really a case-by-case basis. The exciting thing is that there’s opportunities out there because you are seeing a lot of companies that are selling off too much for perceived risk and so we’re finding some interesting investment opportunities.
Ryan Bridge
Fantastic. Andrew, great to have an update with you on tech as always. Thanks so much for being with me.
Andrew Curtayne
Thanks, Ryan.
Ryan Bridge
And that was Andrew Curtayne, Senior Analyst at Milford talking to us about AI, Big Tech and OpenClaw. Who’s going to go use it now? Thanks so much for listening, everyone. Don’t forget you can like, follow and subscribe to this podcast wherever you like to listen. Until next week, don’t forget to invest in yourselves.
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