Agents at Work — Sydney: Build, Don't Rent (An OpenClaw Meetup)
I Built My Own OS and Cancelled the SaaS — Genius or Madness
Agentic AI beyond the hype — what happens when you stop renting software and run your business on a team of bots.
Everyone's got an opinion on AI agents. Far fewer are actually running one — quoting clients, handling ops, doing the books, managing the day-to-day — and living with the results every morning.
Here's the provocation for the night: a non-technical business owner who built a complete operating system around his company and walked away from the usual stack of SaaS subscriptions. Not a chatbot bolted onto a CRM. An actual operational layer doing real work.
Then the counterweight: a 20-year veteran of building software for Australian businesses, on what it really takes to make agentic systems hold together — and where they fall over.
Less "the future of AI." More "here's the bot that quoted a client wrong on Tuesday, and what we changed so it wouldn't happen again."
The real version: morning stand-ups with a fleet of bots, handing out awards to the best-performing bot teams, the architecture underneath it, the risks nobody warns you about, and live demos of agents doing actual work — not slideware.
Who's speaking:
Craig Helmers — Runs a Sydney commercial plant-hire business and, somehow, an entire AI operating system on top of it.
Completely non-technical, and now running the business without the pile of SaaS tools most operators take for granted. He'll walk you through the genuinely strange reality of "managing" a team of agents: the stand-ups, the awards, the daily wrangling, and how it all stays the right side of chaos. Sounds mad until you watch it run.
Sasha Shevelev — Founder & MD of Webcoda (https://webcoda.com.au) , a Sydney digital agency with 20+ years of building software for Australian businesses and Government. He’ll take you through the technical half of the night: the maintenance, debugging and operational work that makes agentic systems actually usable day to day.
We’ll cover version control, security and privacy, voice interfaces, Telegram and Discord workflows, multi-developer setups, deployment, and managing token usage at scale.
Together: how systems like OpenClaw move past chatbots into real operational infrastructure — and whether "build, don't rent" actually holds up.
Agenda
AGENDA
6:00–6:30 | Arrival & networking Grab a drink, meet the room.
6:30–6:40 | Welcome & intros
6:40–7:05 | Craig — Running a company on bots (and ditching the SaaS) The non-technical operator's story: stand-ups, awards, and keeping it all the right side of chaos.
7:05–7:20 | Live demo The bot fleet doing real work.
7:20–7:45 | Sasha — The technical guts: Building a solid foundation, the SDLC, OpenClaw in the Enterprise, and the tips and tricks learned in the trenches
7:45–8:00 | Live demo Under the hood.
8:00–8:25 | Q&A Both speakers. No question too dumb.
8:25–9:00 | More networking Kick on, swap notes.
Details
📍 Venue: Dovetail, Surry Hills
📅 Date: Wednesday 22 July 2026
🕕 Time: 6:00pm – 9:00pm
🎟️ Cost: $5 — covers food
🍻 Food & drinks: Light bites included
Spots are limited by venue capacity, so grab one early.