Gusto Co-founder & Head of Technology here. I'm excited for this as much as I was our first ZenPayroll launch HN post 15 years ago.
Today, we're launching Gusto Cofounder to the world. Here's a Loom video I recoded showing a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DBpVvJJeKc
It takes the best parts of OpenClaw, Claude Cowork and Gusto capabilities into a single new product experience. Some key characteristics of this:
- Automations. You have a conversion with Gusto Cofounder to automate a business process that you have. These automations run in the background on a recurring schedule.
- Connectors: You connect Gusto Cofounder to systems that sit outside of Gusto, such as Notion, Google Sheets, or Quickbooks. Automations can do things *across* these systems. Connect to any remote MCP server.
- Channels: You talk to Gusto Cofounder via SMS or Slack. If you've used OpenClaw, you know how magical that can be. Automations can give you updates over SMS, and you can reply back.
- Gusto data + capabilities: And of course, it comes out of the box with many Gusto capabilities across Payroll, Time, Expenses, Scheduling, HR, Reporting and more.
- Cloud-based: Safer and no installation needed.
If it sounds like a mashup of OpenClaw, Claude Cowork, and Gusto, you’re absolutely right.
So why is this any different?
OpenClaw and Claude Cowork are such powerful tools, but they suffer from the "blank canvas" problem. Most users just don't know what to do with it, even though it can do so much. I spent 8 hours installing my own OpenClaw on my Mac mini and once I did that, I still didn’t know what to do with it. It’s just a glorified search engine to me.
I thought to myself, if we ground this technology in *real* problems that Gusto ALREADY solves for our customers, like payroll, time, HR, etc., there's a good chance that small businesses will finally get the version of AI that that everyone keeps talking about but never really see.
You can put Gusto Cofounder to work with a simple message:
- "Run payroll for me every Friday. Text me if there are any anomalies greater than 10% from the previous week’s payroll, and flag anything that needs my approval before it submits."
- "Generate a weekly labor cost report by department and send it to me over Slack every Monday morning."
- “Every morning, check the weather and if it’s forecasted to rain, send an email reminder to today’s customers to bring an umbrella along with them for the tour. The customers are in the Google Sheets titled with today’s date.”
- "Send me an approval request for any team expense over $25 before it gets processed. Otherwise, just approve it for me."
- "Flag any time-off requests that overlap with payroll deadlines or leave the team short-staffed."
Want early access? Sign up at: https://gusto.com/cofounder. If you leave a message in the comment, I’ll turn it on for you by EOD.
Would love your feedback and thoughts on it!