India, Oct. 17 -- Danny John Kurian, an IT consultant based out of Bengaluru, kept throwing out groceries he had forgotten were in his kitchen. He is now building an AI agent to remember them for him. He calls it Pantry Brain. It scans groceries by barcode, tracks expiry dates and reminds him to use items before they go bad.

"The problem was not theoretical," Danny said. Pantry Brain is one module in a setup he runs on OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent. Another module reads his Gmail and summarises the important emails from the previous day. A third, which he calls Home Pulse, turns on his PC remotely and vacuums specific rooms of his home through a prompt.

What an agent is Think of a humanoid robot. It has two arms and two legs, and no...