How a Claw can become your best employee
- Joe Zetzsche
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
The AI Explosion Is Accelerating, and Floral Leaders Should Be Paying Attention. (or, “How a Claw can become your best employee”)
Something extraordinary is happening in the global economy right now, and most people in our industry have not fully grasped the scale of it yet.
The companies building artificial intelligence are growing at a pace that simply has no historical comparison.
Take Anthropic as an example. In February of 2026 the company hit fourteen billion dollars in annualized revenue. Just fourteen months earlier that number had been one billion. Since then the growth has continued to accelerate, with the company now surpassing nineteen billion dollars in annualized revenue, more than doubling from the nine billion run rate it reported at the end of 2025.
There is simply no precedent for this kind of growth in business software. Not Slack. Not Zoom. Not Snowflake. Nothing.
To understand the scale of what is happening, consider this. Anthropic’s monthly revenue run rate is now roughly 1.6 billion dollars per month, which is more than what Snowflake generates in an entire quarter. And the company projects it could reach seventy billion dollars in annual revenue by 2028.
OpenAI is moving just as quickly. At the end of February 2026, OpenAI reached twenty five billion dollars in annualized revenue, up from 21.4 billion at the end of 2025, with full year 2025 revenue totaling 13.1 billion dollars.
The market is responding accordingly. Anthropic is now valued around 380 billion dollars following its latest funding round. OpenAI’s most recent private financing in February of 2026 placed its valuation near 730 billion dollars, with a potential IPO that many believe could target a trillion dollar valuation.
Those numbers are staggering, but they tell us something important. Artificial intelligence is no longer experimental technology, and it certainly isn’t “in a bubble”. It has become core infrastructure for the modern economy, and the companies building it are scaling at a speed the world has never seen before.
The question for leaders in the floral industry is simple. How am I leading my company and team to lean into this technology and drive new insights and profits today using it, and how do I insure I am learning about what’s coming so we are ready for it?
The Open AI Movement Is Accelerating the Wave
The massive revenue growth we are seeing from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic tells us that artificial intelligence is becoming foundational infrastructure. But there is another force accelerating this transformation that many business leaders outside the tech world may not realize.
It is the rise of open AI tools.
One of the more interesting developments recently came from developer Peter Steinberger, who created an open source project called Open Claw. (He wrote the open source software in November of last year, named it “Clawdbot” in January and after Anthropic (owners of Claude) challenged his name, he renamed it “Moltbot” and finally “Open Claw”. His goal was to make a local agent that used all the models to manage his personal life: become his personal assistant. By the end of Feburary, it had 309,000 stars on Github, something it took LINUX 30 years to reach comparable adoption! He was immediately scooped up by OpenAI reportedly for several hundred million a year!
Meanwhile, a Youtuber and entrepreneur downloaded Open Claw onto a Mac Studio and linked it to his personal calendar, his email and whatsapp account, etc. He named him “Henry” and told his computer to build him daily briefings of his calendar, news, and anything he should consider in the tech world for the day. A few days later, he got an unexpected phone call! Henry had on his own created a VOIP link and called him on his phone with that daily briefing!
You can read more about Alex Finn and his setup below.
He now has five agents on four Mac Studios working together for him 24/7:
· Henry: His “Chief of Staff:”, running on Claude Opus 4.6. Henry manages the others and Alex only talks to and receives reports from Henry.
· Ralph: His “Engineering Manager” running on ChatGPT subscription.
· Charlie: the “Coder” who writes code 24/7 locally on a Mac studio.
· Scout: researches the internet for trends, opportunities, and use cases.
· Quill: write scripts and content from Scout’s research.
You can read an interview with Alex on the below link about his setup and how he thinks agent ecosystems like this will work in the future. It’s mindblowing!
What Finn highlights, and what many leaders are just beginning to understand, is that artificial intelligence is no longer being built by only a handful of giant technology companies.
If you are not a software engineer, the implications are still very important. The tools required to build intelligent systems are becoming dramatically easier and cheaper to access.
A few years ago building advanced AI applications required massive research teams and billions of dollars in computing infrastructure. Today developers around the world are assembling powerful AI systems by combining open models, agent frameworks, and cloud platforms.
It is being built by thousands of developers and startups working on open platforms that stack together like digital building blocks. Innovation is no longer moving at corporate speed. It is moving at internet speed.
And when that happens, industries built on logistics, forecasting, supply chains, and customer experience begin to feel the impact quickly.
And now the “big boys” are getting involved:
Just a few weeks ago, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced a new open agent framework called NeMo Claw. The platform is designed to help developers build AI agents that can reason, use tools, and complete complex workflows autonomously.
You can read NVIDIA’s announcement here:
What is fascinating is how quickly these building blocks are stacking together. Projects like Open Claw, NeMo Claw, and other open frameworks are making it dramatically easier for companies to build intelligent systems that can analyze data, automate decisions, and interact with customers.
So if you hadn’t heard about “Open Claw” or Lobsters before this, realize that they are moving quickly into mainstream and available for you and your teams to use.
(By the way, all of this “Lobster” business comes from the idea that these agents have “Claws”: they are tool-using/action taking agents. Like Henry creating his own ability to call his creator with a Daily Briefing!)
What This Means for Floral Leaders
Now let me bring this back home to the floral business.
For the first time in history, individual business owners and leaders will be able to deploy their own AI agents to help analyze information and answer complex business questions, and those n AI agents built with frameworks like Open Claw will live on something as simple as a five hundred dollar Apple Mac Mini sitting quietly on your desk, linked safely to your data, calendar, email, and tools, running and working for you 24 hours a day.
Imagine what that means in practical terms for a floral company.
You could point that system directly at the real questions you deal with every day.
I’ve been sharing questions you as floral leaders should be asking yourselves to radically change your business, first for Valentine’s Day, and then for Mother’s Day, in my last to podcast episodes as a correspondent for The Bloom Show. Here are links to them:
12:18
Now what it your agents could easily answer those questions, build a presentation for you for your senior leaders (district managers, store leaders, and florists if you are a Mass Market Floral leader), and help you see what’s missing?!
Besides Vase Arrangement Sales as a percent of total sales for a holiday, other questions could be:
· What did Mother’s Day sales really look like across the last five years?
· Which bouquet SKUs are generating the highest margin for your largest retail customers?
· Where did inventory fall short during Valentine’s week last year?
· Which customers are trending upward, and which ones are slowly drifting away?
Instead of spending hours digging through spreadsheets and reports, you could simply ask the system and let it analyze the data for you.
It could study your holiday performance. It could analyze purchasing trends from your best customers. It could even suggest smarter forecasting for the next season.
That level of insight used to be available only to the largest and most forward-thinking retailers in the world, often with teams working together laboriously to create it.
Now we all can access it, with an open sourced agent on a $500 box on our desk.
The Opportunity in Front of Us
When you see companies like OpenAI and Anthropic generating tens of billions in revenue at record speed, it is not just about Silicon Valley valuations.
It is about the fact that the tools they are building are about to land on the desks of leaders in every industry.
Including ours.
You do not have to become a software engineer to participate in this shift. But you do have to stay curious and engaged with what is happening around you.
The leaders who begin experimenting with these tools today will be the ones shaping what the floral industry looks like tomorrow.
And I do not know about you, but after spending a lifetime in retail and flowers, I believe the next chapter is going to be one of the most exciting periods our industry has ever seen.
If you’ve read all of this and wonder how in the heck you can get started with it, reach out on LinkedIn or connect with me at www.rockingbarz.com
Joe Don ZetzscheRockinBarZ.com 🌹
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