AI brokers are poised to interchange standalone LLMs within the enterprise, if Ilan Twig CTO and co-founder of Navan, is correct.
“My advice to any CXO on the market, COOs, CIOs, is you could embrace this expertise. There is not any different approach,” he mentioned.
Twig shared his perspective in an interview with InformationWeek after his presentation on the current Momentum AI convention in New York Metropolis. Throughout the interview, Twig mentioned Navan, a company journey reserving SaaS platform, used OpenClaw to construct its lately introduced TravelClaw agentic layer.
OpenClaw is an open supply, autonomous AI agent. Navan’s TravelClaw is presently solely utilized by Twig himself throughout growth and testing. When launched at scale, TravelClaw is anticipated to proactively contact its customers by way of electronic mail and apps to deal with journey points, quite than ready for prompts, as chatbots do. Twig mentioned TravelClaw would operate constantly within the background, monitoring journey particulars.
The agentic wave Twig foresees definitely aligns with the bullish feedback from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has urged CEOs to embrace an OpenClaw imaginative and prescient for his or her corporations. Navan’s aggressive pursuit of agentic and different AI expertise is a part of Twig’s ongoing technique to broaden what a comparatively small group can accomplish with AI instruments.
And regardless of his “LLMs are useless” rhetoric, Twig acknowledged that the introduction of ChatGPT had a seismic impact.
“Lots of people within the firm know that I misplaced eight kilos researching this expertise. I did not eat. It is a true story,” Twig mentioned.
He defined how his first step to get his arms round ChatGPT’s capabilities in late 2022 was to obtain “an excellent costly GPU,” which took a little bit of effort. “I reached out to my co-founder. I am like, ‘I want $30,000 to construct a PC.’ And he is like, ‘What?!'”
After making an attempt to elucidate the necessity, Twig mentioned he finally secured the {hardware} himself as a result of — as a CTO — he needed to have firsthand expertise with ChatGPT earlier than deploying it to manufacturing inside Navan.
Twig in contrast his method to vetting the chatbot to interviewing job candidates earlier than hiring them. This included switching to ChatGPT’s uncensored fashions, which didn’t undergo the final section of coaching on what is correct and incorrect, or the best way to be politically appropriate. “I do not need to get into politics, however I actually needed to see the character of it,” he mentioned.
These experiences helped him discover methods to make the expertise safer and safer to guard the group and its clients.
It additionally cemented his bullish tackle agentic AI.
All-in for the rise of AI brokers
The present craze for brokers is comparatively new within the AI hype cycle. Twig mentioned that within the early days, nobody actually mentioned AI brokers, however the time period took off in January 2025 on the World Financial Discussion board Annual Assembly. “I used to be there in Davos, and that is what everybody was speaking about. Agentic, agentic, agentic,” he mentioned.
Wayfair CTO Fiona Tan additionally mentioned AI brokers on the Momentum AI occasion, and the way they’re being deployed throughout retail client items, and different sectors.
Twig urged his friends to familiarize themselves with expertise reminiscent of OpenClaw, even when it means working with it on an remoted machine — the best way Navan’s TravelClaw is being developed. “Don’t use LLMs; use agentic techniques.”
He is satisfied that OpenClaw could possibly be the beginning of a considerable AI revolution.
“To me, it’s as massive as ChatGPT when ChatGPT [first] got here out. I simply do not suppose that most individuals notice it … Interview me in two years, and you will notice that every thing is within the OpenClaw spirit,” he mentioned.
There are an a variety of benefits and advances Twig present in his exploration of OpenClaw. For starters, he described OpenClaw as making an LLM extra proactive and autonomous, shifting its capabilities from options to tasks.
That “sense” of duty taken has been evident as Twig runs Navan’s TravelClaw agent on his personal cellphone, letting it monitor his journey, itineraries and his location. “It is aware of every thing. It doesn’t await me to immediate it to do stuff for me. It prompts me,” he mentioned.
For instance, TravelClaw knew Twig wanted to get to the airport inside a couple of hours of the interview, and it truly received anxious, so to talk, about arriving on schedule. “That is the shift to duty. It needs to be sure that I’ll get there on time and won’t miss my flight.”
Weighing the liberty and authority granted to brokers
The autonomy TravelClaw has contains waking itself up every time it needs to carry out features in context with Twig’s wants. Navan’s AI-powered journey assistant, Ava, additionally talks to TravelClaw with out him realizing about it to be able to clear up points on his behalf. For instance, if he needed an aisle seat however it’s not accessible initially, TravelClaw will proceed its reserving efforts by itself.
“It might wake itself up on daily basis to speak to Ava and verify if there’s an aisle seat accessible on the flight,” Twig mentioned.
If such a seat grew to become accessible, TravelClaw would verify with its customers by way of messaging apps reminiscent of Telegram, WhatsApp, iMessage or Slack.
Twig additionally gave TravelClaw a little bit of a problem by asking it to e book a restaurant though the Ava private assistant doesn’t have that characteristic but. So TravelClaw tried to contact a reside human agent to finish its activity, which led engineers to intervene.
“It was actually humorous. That is how far the agent would go to unravel my drawback. It does not care. It has duty,” Twig mentioned.
That proactive nature, nevertheless, have to be managed. He warned that TravelClaw may destroy his laptop, so right now, he has not granted it freedom throughout the enterprise. Because the world learns to work with brokers, Twig mentioned he believes Navan’s early begin with the expertise has ready it for future prospects. “I am prepared for the following factor.”
