Nathaniel Whittemore

The big new feature is the ability to build web apps end-to-end without leaving Manus, making the agent more useful as a vibe coding platform.

Kind of seems like ultimately everything, even the general purpose agents, are a vibe coding platform in the end.

Another small but potentially powerful feature announcement.

Agent orchestration startup Lindy has announced an AI chief marketing officer for your company.

CEO Flo Crivello wrote, announcing Lindy AICMO, a team of agents running entire marketing workflows end-to-end, handling market research, analysis, and creative at scale, so you can start thousands of ad experiments in minutes.

As part of this, we're launching new integrations with Sora 2, VO 3.1, Nanobanana, and GPT ImageGen.

Over the last few years, agents have grown tremendously in their scope and autonomy, going from handling simple tasks to assuming entire roles.

This will be the first time that we see them take a chunk out of an entire org.

I'm considering trying this out as CMO of AIDB, given that, as I've mentioned, I'm hiring for some growth roles.

If that's an experiment that you would be interested in following along with, let me know and we'll see what can happen.

Lastly, I am continuing to do our ROI corner, ROI shoutouts.

ROI is going to be a major theme for next year.

And so when we see companies reporting actual ROI from AI, you are going to get it here.

The latest comes from Alibaba, who have announced that they've reached breakeven on AI in their e-commerce business.

In February of this year, the Chinese tech giant announced they would spend $53 billion on AI over the next three years.

They've since rolled out a string of features, including personalized AI search and virtual clothing try-ons.

Now, a company official has announced that preliminary testing of their AI features has shown consistent results, including a 12% increase in return on advertising spend.

VP Kaifu Zhang said it's very rare to see double-digit changes.

Zhang predicted that AI would have a, quote, very significant positive impact on sales during this year's Singles Day shopping period, which centers around November 11th.

Meanwhile, I would anticipate that in the US, we're going to see a bit of an AI-focused Black Friday as well.