The Agent Wave Is Here: What Perplexity Computer and OpenClaw Mean for B2B Marketers

Something shifted in the first quarter of 2026. Not gradually — abruptly. Several major agentic AI announcements landed in the space of a few weeks, and taken together, they represent the most significant change to how software gets used since the smartphone.

Perplexity Computer launched on 25 February. OpenClaw — the fastest-growing open-source project in the history of software — passed 250,000 GitHub stars, and NVIDIA unveiled NemoClaw at GTC 2026 to put enterprise guardrails around it. Anthropic shipped Computer Use in Claude — letting an AI operate a Mac desktop directly — in late March. OpenAI merged Operator into ChatGPT's Agent Mode and launched Atlas, a full Chromium-based browser with AI baked into every tab. Claude Code gained Remote Control, letting you kick off a task at your desk and supervise it from your phone.

If you're a B2B marketer, your immediate reaction might be: that sounds like a developer story. It isn't. This is a marketing story. And the implications for your SEO, your PPC, and the entire question of who your content is actually written for are more immediate than most people realise.

What Are These Tools, and What Do They Actually Do?

Perplexity Computer

Perplexity Computer is the clearest example of what "agentic AI" means in practice. You describe an outcome — "research this market segment and produce a competitive analysis" — and Computer breaks it into tasks, assigns each one to the best available model, and executes them in parallel. It draws on 19 different AI models, including Claude Opus 4.6 for core reasoning, Gemini for visual outputs, and GPT-5.2 for broad web search.

This isn't a chatbot. It isn't a smarter search bar. It's a digital worker that runs inside an isolated cloud environment, operates real software, and delivers finished outputs — websites, visualisations, documents, reports — without continuous human input. Available to Perplexity Max subscribers at $200/month, it's positioned at enterprise teams and power users who need actual work done, not just answers delivered.

OpenClaw and NemoClaw

OpenClaw was created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, who built it as a playground project in late 2025. Originally called Clawdbot (a pun on "Claude"), it was renamed twice in a single week following trademark pressure from Anthropic — first to Moltbot, then to OpenClaw. It went on to surpass 250,000 GitHub stars, becoming the fastest-growing repository in GitHub history. Steinberger subsequently joined OpenAI in February 2026, with the project moving to an independent foundation.

OpenClaw is a personal AI agent that runs on your own devices. It reads and writes files, executes browser tasks, sends emails, calls APIs, and integrates with messaging platforms including WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and Discord — all without confirmation at each step.

NemoClaw is NVIDIA's enterprise layer, announced at GTC 2026 on 16 March. It wraps OpenClaw in a security-hardened sandbox (OpenShell), a privacy router, local model inference, and audit logs. The partner ecosystem already includes Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Google. The point is simple: to move OpenClaw from developer experimentation into regulated corporate environments.

Jensen Huang's mandate at GTC was unambiguous: "Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy."

Claude Computer Use and Remote Control

In March 2026, Anthropic shipped Claude Computer Use — Claude can now open apps, navigate a browser, fill spreadsheets, and export reports on a Mac desktop, working exactly as a human operator would. On OSWorld benchmarks, Claude's computer-use accuracy went from under 15% in 2024 to 72.5% in early 2026.

Alongside this, Remote Control bridges your local Claude Code session with the claude.ai web interface and mobile apps. You start a task on your machine, then step away — Claude continues working, and you supervise from your phone. Your files, your MCP integrations, and your project context all stay local. Only instructions and results flow through an encrypted connection. Combined with Dispatch (send tasks from mobile) and Claude Code Channels (Discord and Telegram integration), it's a complete picture of always-on AI doing real work on your machine while you're elsewhere.

ChatGPT Agent Mode and Atlas

OpenAI's answer to this shift has two parts. Operator — launched in early 2025 as a research preview — was absorbed into ChatGPT as "Agent Mode" by July 2025, proving the concept was too valuable to remain a separate product. Agent Mode gives ChatGPT a virtual computer: it browses, clicks, fills forms, runs analysis, and delivers finished outputs — spreadsheets, presentations, competitive briefings — from a single instruction.

Then in October 2025, OpenAI launched Atlas: a full Chromium-based browser with ChatGPT integrated throughout. Atlas isn't just AI in a sidebar. In Agent Mode, it operates the browser on your behalf — navigating sites, completing purchases, filing forms, building reports — with persistent memory across sessions. It has partnerships with DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable, and Uber for direct workflow integrations. Agent Mode requires a Plus or Pro subscription and is currently available on macOS.

As Paul Roetzer of the Marketing AI Institute put it at the time of Atlas's launch: "A lot of the communication that individuals have with our brands in the future, and the purchasing decisions they may make, might not actually be them. It may be their agent." That's the sentence every B2B marketer should sit with.

Why Does This Matter Right Now for B2B Marketing?

Here's the figure that should stop you in your tracks.Gartner predicts that by 2028, 90% of B2B buying will be AI agent intermediated — pushing over $15 trillion of B2B spend through AI agent exchanges.

That's two years away.

It means the buyer journey you've spent years optimising for — search, click, content, form, nurture sequence — is going to be increasingly bypassed by AI agents doing the research and shortlisting on behalf of your prospects. The human still makes the decision. But the list of options that lands in front of them will have been filtered, ranked, and framed by an AI first.

So when someone at a prospective client uses Perplexity Computer or ChatGPT Agent Mode to research "Best CRM software for X" and asks it to produce a shortlist — what makes your company appear? What gets cited? What gets discarded?

This is the question that should be driving your content strategy right now.

Who Is the Third User of Your Website?

For a long time, we built websites for two audiences: humans and Google's crawler. The implicit contract was: make it good for people to read, make it technically sound for Google to index, and rankings will follow.

That contract has a third party now. AI agents are users of your website. When Perplexity Computer researches your market category, when a procurement professional uses an OpenClaw agent to build a vendor shortlist, when ChatGPT Agent Mode compiles a competitive analysis on behalf of a buyer — they're all reading your content and making decisions about whether to surface your brand.

The catch is they read completely differently to humans. They don't scan headings and skim. They extract structured information, cross-reference claims across multiple sources, assess consistency, and favour clear factual assertions over clever prose.

Content that performs well with AI agents shares specific characteristics: direct answers before expanded context, question-based headings that mirror how users query, modular sections that stand alone as citable units, original data and proprietary frameworks, and consistent brand facts across every owned and earned channel.

When a B2B buyer clicks through from an AI citation, they are often already qualified and ready to evaluate. Your job is to make sure your brand is in that citation pool to begin with.

What Does This Mean for Your SEO and AEO Strategy?

The fundamentals of traditional SEO haven't changed. Google AI Overviews still show 76% overlap with the top 10 organic results. Strong rankings remain the foundation. But the ceiling has moved.

Being on page one used to be the goal. Now it's the floor. What matters above that floor is whether your content gets cited by AI engines — and the signals they use to make that call are different from keyword proximity and link count.

The platform differences matter here:

• Perplexity: strong proximity to traditional rankings, but it particularly favours well-structured, citable content with clear data and explicit source attribution.
• ChatGPT: only 8% overlap with Google's top 10. Original frameworks, unique research, and expert content that can't be found elsewhere are what surface here.
• Google AI Overviews: traditional SEO wins. The investment you've made in authority and technical foundations pays off directly.

The implication: you need both. The agencies and businesses that treat AI SEO as a bolt-on are missing the point. AI visibility has to be built into how content is structured from the start, not applied after the fact.

Agents as the First Users of Your Content: The Implication You Can't Ignore

Here's the frame that brings this together. For most of the history of digital marketing, the sequence was: a human has a problem, a human searches, a human reads, a human contacts you.

That sequence is changing to: a human has a problem, an AI agent researches, an AI agent shortlists, a human chooses from the shortlist.

Your content now needs to perform well with two very different audiences — the AI that makes the initial cut, and the human who makes the final call. These aren't opposing requirements. The same content that earns AI citations — clear, authoritative, structured, data-rich, original — is also the content that builds genuine credibility with experienced buyers.

But you have to build it with both in mind. Content that's written to impress humans but isn't structured for AI extraction won't surface. Content that's technically well-optimised but thin on genuine expertise won't earn human trust when it does get clicked.

The agencies and businesses that recognise this now — and build content architecture that serves both — will have a meaningful advantage in the next two years. Because if Gartner's 90%-of-B2B-buying-through-agents prediction is even half right, the brands that aren't in the AI citation pool by 2027 will be fighting for the scraps.

What to Do in the Next 90 Days

Audit your AI crawler accessibility. Check that GPTBot, anthropic-ai, and PerplexityBot are permitted in your robots.txt. Ensure key content pages serve clean HTML — especially if your site has JavaScript-dependent sections that may render differently for crawlers.

Restructure your key commercial pages for answer-first architecture. Every major section should open with a direct, self-contained answer (40–60 words) before expanding. This is what AI engines extract and cite. It's also what experienced buyers appreciate when they land on a page.

Build original data assets. Proprietary data, client results, unique frameworks, and first-person case studies are what AI engines favour when other signals are equal. Start building them now — this is your long-term citation equity.

Get a proper AI visibility baseline. Manual prompt testing is a starting point. But use a dedicated AI visibility tracker to get real longitudinal data across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. You need to know what you're measuring before you can improve it — and you need the data to prove improvement to your stakeholders.

The agent wave isn't coming. It's here. The question is whether your brand is ready to be found by it.

If you want to understand where you currently stand in AI search — and build a strategy to improve it — book a free strategy session with the Angelfish team.

Angelfish Marketing is a specialist B2B SEO and digital marketing agency based in Cheltenham. We help ambitious B2B companies achieve measurable growth through strategic SEO, AEO, paid search, and HubSpot — backed by 10 years of expertise, real client results, and an obsession with staying ahead of where search is heading. We're a HubSpot Diamond Partner, Google Partner, SEMrush certified, and LinkedIn Ads partner.