I recently returned from a quick trip with United as my carrier to fly me out. United offers free Messaging (for those planes not yet Starlink’d up) which gives you SMS and WhatsApp for free. This is a free tunnel to your AI agent. Let me explain.

I have written historically how I have set up Marge as my personal AI agent running OpenClaw in a virtual machine. I have plumbed her into WhatsApp, which allows me to toss her links, thoughts, to do items, and various other things as I go on. WhatsApp is integrated as a top-level citizen to “Share” on my phone, so it is easy to have her as my catch-all bucket. Like a true assistant.

OpenClaw talks out to WhatsApp, so there is no incoming tunnel I had to create and this mechanism gives me full access to all the skills and rules I have setup for Marge. Marge is with me at 35,000 ft!

Even though United offers free messaging, I have access to everything via Marge. I asked Marge to look up my current inbox to see if there was anything needing attention. I asked her to review my LinkedIn messages. I remembered a Reddit post, but couldn’t recall the details, so I asked Marge to give me the text for that.

She happily complied and delivered the results, up to me, while flying across the continental USA. All via WhatsApp.

I had full access to my world, all secure, running my private local models. I can even switch my model (/model) using the slash commands, so I was able to jump over to using Deepseek for something that required a little more horsepower.

The WhatsApp connection from OpenClaw (Telegram, Signal etc. are also available – I recently setup Telegram as their topic feature lets me have independent sessions with Marge at the same time – though Telegram not available over United’s free messaging), lets me literally chat with Marge as if she was a real assistant.

This just a small glimpse the power a local AI setup can give you, no matter where or high up you are in the world.