I just watched an ERP rewrite itself.

Hi, and happy Wednesday.

I recently met with Nikhil Jathar: ERP builder, ex-Accenture, the kind of person who has survived enough SAP rollouts that he could probably write a memoir that reads like a war diary.

He’s built a 26-module ERP on OpenClaw.

You can watch his demo and my conversation with him here:

If you’ve been following this newsletter, you’ll know that OpenClaw is a viral agentic platform. We’ve been building an “AI employee” on it  - which we demo’d to some of you.

In recent weeks OpenClaw has been overshadowed by Claude Cowork, which has adopted many of OpenClaw’s features.

But, Claude Cowork is ultimately still a tool. 

OpenClaw is a platform to build on top of - which is what Nikhil demonstrated. 

By building his ERP on top of OpenClaw, Nikhil was able to demonstrate that you can:

• Now talk to your ERP in chat

• Instruct it to create invoices, customers and products - talking to it in the same way you’d talk to a colleagues

• And builds UI on the fly

Yes - you can change the software itself while using it!

At one point, Nikhil says: “If you don’t like the screen… you just tell the AI to change it.”

Why is this important?

Most of the tools your company runs on were designed by developers who have never once done your job.

Think about that for a moment!

They built screens. You learned workarounds. Somewhere along the way, "user adoption" became a euphemism for "Stockholm syndrome."

Then someone in operations says, "Can we add a field for vessel tracking numbers?" and the answer is a four-month IT project, a steering committee, and a change request form that itself requires a change request form.

This is the world Nikhil decided to blow up.

(Whether he's actually blown it up or just starting to close the curtain for the current paradigm of software remains an open question. But the direction is clear.)

—

If you watch the demo, beyond the malleability of software, three other things becomes apparent: 

1. Chat becomes THE interface.

While we are accustomed to chat interfaces, there has always been a debate as to whether it would last.

What this demo shows, though, is the power of users being able to describe something fuzzy and ill-formed and it still working!

Just:

“Show me invoices”

“Send this to the customer”

And it happens. No searching through menus or remembering how and where to click.

2. The cost of software development is dropping

If ERPs are not what you are interested in, Nikhil showed how to build any software application on the OpenClaw stack. I asked him to build a CRM for the oil industry. He showed me how he:

• Researches the domain

• Drafts a product plan

• Creates the database structures

• Builds functionality

• Deploys it

• Creates a working system

What previously might have taken weeks or months, he showed how to build within an hour.

3. Software is becoming a service (again)

Through our discussion, we landed on a reality - though this all looks easy, organizations will still want to hire people who are proficient in building applications in this way.

This means, instead of buying package software, companies will likely now shift to hiring people (for firms) who understand the domain + the AI + how to build the system.

Building applications in this way is more or less what we - at PreScouter - are shifting towards ourselves.

—

Watch the full demo and my conversation with Nikhil Jathar here:

If you're trying to figure out what “AI-native” means for your company, we’re happy to share what’s working (and what’s breaking).

Best,

Dino