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How Your AI Helper Works

Every BrainRoad account gets two AI helper runtimes, OpenClaw and Hermes, running in a private workspace and working from one shared Business Brain.

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One Private Workspace, Two Helpers, One Brain

When you sign up, BrainRoad provisions a private workspace that belongs entirely to you. Inside it run two sister AI helper runtimes:

  • OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent runtime (MIT licensed).
  • Hermes, a second open-source agent runtime from NousResearch, also MIT licensed.

Both start automatically when your account is set up. There is no “Start” button to click on day one: you land on the dashboard with both helpers already booting. You can run both side by side, stop either one, and decide which interface you prefer.

The important part is what they share: your Business Brain. Both helpers work from the same private collection of files, notes, customer history, FAQs, templates, rules, and decisions you build up over time. Switching between OpenClaw and Hermes never means re-teaching your business. See what the Business Brain is.

Isolation

Your helpers run in their own isolated environment with defined resource limits. No other user shares your workspace, storage, or configuration. Your files and conversation history live on dedicated persistent storage that survives restarts and stop/start cycles.

Draft First, You Approve

Any time a helper wants to touch the outside world, it drafts the action first: an email reply, a quote, a booking invitation, a note to the Brain. The draft lands in your Inbox on the dashboard, where you edit, approve, or decline it before anything goes out. Helpers that repeatedly earn your approval on low-risk email replies can be offered narrow, capped autonomy for a specific thread, and you can pause or revoke that at any time. High-stakes messages always come back to you. Details: how review works.

What Lives Inside the Workspace

  • Persistent files and history. Everything the helpers work with survives restarts.
  • The Business Brain connection. Both runtimes reach your Brain through a secure per-user connection.
  • A managed work mailbox. After your OpenClaw helper introduces itself and picks a name, it gets a real mailbox at @mg.brainroad.com. See your helper’s email and phone.
  • A sandboxed browser (OpenClaw only). The helper can browse the web in a contained browser, and you can watch it live on the dashboard’s Browser page.
  • Preinstalled coding tools. The Claude Code CLI and OpenAI Codex CLI ship in the workspace, usable from the dashboard Console. Using them requires your own Anthropic or OpenAI API key.

The Thin Wrapper Model

BrainRoad deliberately does not fork or rebuild the runtimes. It hosts them, wires them to your Business Brain, manages their lifecycle, and adds the review layer. Chat, channels, sessions, and runtime configuration are the runtime’s own screens, opened from the dashboard in a new tab. As OpenClaw and Hermes improve upstream, your helpers pick up those improvements when BrainRoad updates its images.