While Manus has captured consumer interest, enterprise adoption of this type of autonomous general agent might be a longer road, if it makes sense at all. The LLMs powering agents that have drawn so much attention in the last 12 months are mostly trained on publicly available data. In contrast, only 1% of enterprise data is currently used in large language models.
The 99% of data that is not captured represents a gold mine for those companies looking to use LLMs and agents to unlock the value in that data. Enterprise AI agents, however, are generally used differently than personal AI agents. For instance, individuals might use an agent built by a company such as Manus AI or OpenAI to schedule a flight or review their resume.
Enterprises, however, often seek an agent system built with either closed or open-source tools that has been customized for their specific business needs to be as cost efficient as possible (think Salesforce’s Agentforce or IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate). Companies also have a tremendous amount of data they do not want to move off premises for security reasons. These enterprise agents are typically powered by smaller fit-for-purpose language models, such as IBM’s Granite series, that keep necessary data on site.
Whether Manus has enterprise AI ambitions is unclear, however, its newly announced partner, Alibaba, certainly does. In January, Alibaba announced a new assistant, Qwen 2.5 Max, which runs on the mixture of experts (MoE) architecture, an efficient approach that often appeals to enterprises.
With an MoE architecture, the model only activates the specific sub-networks needed for a given task rather than activating the entire neural network. Consequently, the MoE architecture greatly reduces computation costs during pre-training and achieves faster performance during inference time.
Whether true AI autonomy is achieved with a personal AI agent or an enterprise AI agent remains to be seen. Manus, meanwhile, continues to spark debate.
“Manus is definitely shaking things up here a bit. But there are also a lot of skeptics in the AI community,” says Kaoutar El Maghraoui, a Principal Research Scientist and Manager at IBM in a recent Mixture of Experts episode. “The big question here is, can Manus really redefine AI autonomy? Or is it just another step in an ongoing AI race between East and West?”
