2025 is the year of "agentic AI"

Pundits describe 2025 as the year of "agentic AI" - meaning systems of generative AI that can plan and take action on your behalf.

Last month, a previously unknown firm from China surprised the AI world by releasing Manus, an AI "agent" that can do just that.

I immediately applied for early access and was granted a few days ago. Here are a few tasks that it performed well for me. (All replays are significantly sped up - in real-time they each took about 5 minutes.)

• Find a low-cost flight from San Francisco to Orlando on a certain date, nonstop, with departure and arrival times in a certain window. I could have had it actually purchase the ticket with my credit card if I really were wanting to travel that day.
• Research home-delivered meals for my elderly parents via Door Dash. Match their food preferences and keep it under budget. Similarly, Manus could have actually ordered the meals and scheduled the deliveries had I requested it.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the experience is watching Manus open a web browser, navigate to different web pages, identify information and clickable items, and fill out forms to gather needed information and take action.

For comparison, I gave the same prompts to several other AI systems - ChatGPT, Grok and Sonnet. Predictably each did pretty well, but none of them are capable of taking action - like booking a flight or ordering food delivery - the way Manus is.

Anthropic (maker of Claude Sonnet) and Open AI (maker of ChatGPT) both announced "computer use" in the past few months, but the former is not yet publicly available, and the latter is only available on the paid $200/month Pro plan.

The race is on to enable similar agent-powered AI systems that can plan and take action on your behalf. The next stage of AI's evolution is starting to come into focus. How will you use it in your personal and professional life?