Nous Research released another major Hermes Agent update yesterday. I will spare you the release notes, but I cannot overstate how useful this tool has become. An agent harness gives an AI model memory, access to tools, and a way to keep working through a task. You can give it an objective, let it research, use software, prepare materials, and come back with work you can review. Once you have a capable general-purpose agent working alongside you, the amount of work you can take on changes dramatically.
OpenClaw traces its roots to a November 2025 WhatsApp relay and took its current name in January. Hermes Agent launched in February. The field has since become crowded: Meta's Muse, Grok Bot, OpenAI's dots, and Anthropic's Claude Cowork, alongside its Claude Code and Claude Agent SDK. The major labs clearly see the demand. I expect more than 95% of AI inference demand to flow through agentic harnesses within the next three years. A person can type only so many questions into a chat box. An agent can make hundreds of model calls while working through a project, and teams of agents can keep doing that around the clock.
At Second Mind Systems, we help middle-market companies build general-purpose Hermes agents that report to the C-suite and help the whole team get more done. The meaningful positive impact we are seeing comes from productivity gains and growth. People can pursue work that used to sit on the someday list, move faster on opportunities, and spend less of their day assembling information before they can make a decision. Giving a capable team more capacity is a much more exciting business proposition than looking for the next person to fire.
I recently joined the Oilfield Strong podcast to talk about this, and the episode is now available: AI Agents: Brilliant Assistant or Terrible Idea?. If you are trying to understand how agents fit into an actual operating business, give it a listen. There is a lot of noise around AI, but the usefulness of these tools is already very real. We are seeing it in our own work and in the businesses we help.
Happy Friday.