We Tested Three AI Agents on Real Marketing Work
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
There’s a moment in every technology cycle when a capability stops being a demo and starts being a tool. We think we just hit that moment with AI agents.
Manus launched it. MiniMax followed. This week Kimi dropped K2.5 with an “agent swarm” that can spin up 100 sub-agents working in parallel. (Meta also acquired Manus, which—we’ll be honest—left us with mixed feelings. Nothing makes a tool feel less exciting than watching it get swallowed by a company that will probably use it to optimize engagement metrics for Threads.)
We’ve been cheerleaders for Kimi since the previous version. It’s genuinely the best least-known superpower in a marketer’s toolbox—not because it’s the most powerful, but because it has such a peculiar individual taste when it comes to writing. Most models produce competent slop. Kimi produces voice. So when they announced agentic capabilities, we had to test it properly: Manus vs. MiniMax vs. Kimi, same prompt, same task. No synthetic benchmark but something a marketer might actually need done on a Tuesday afternoon:
If you’ve ever managed an influencer program, you know this task. It’s real work. It usually lives in a junior’s calendar for an entire day.
All three delivered in about ten minutes. But the how was revealing.
Kimi went hunting—returned 35 influencers instead of 20, found actual email addresses and WhatsApp numbers for most of them. You can download the xls here.
MiniMax stuck to the brief but then, unprompted, added a second tab with outreach tips, hashtag analysis, and posting windows (see here)
Manus did exactly what we asked, competently and boringly (results are here).
If you haven’t tried one of these agents yet, this is what you’re missing: not a chatbot that answers questions, but something closer to a sharp junior who goes off and actually does the work. Opens browsers, clicks through profiles, pulls data, builds the spreadsheet, comes back with results. The good ones—and we’d now put Kimi and MiniMax firmly in that camp—also pay attention to what you’re trying to accomplish, not just what you literally asked for. Would we have thought to request posting windows and hashtag analysis? Probably not. But a sharp junior who’s been paying attention might add it anyway.
For $20–40 a month, any of these can replace hours of research grunt work. Never a better time for experimentation.
— Torsten and Peter
3 AI Marketing Tools To Try Today
AdCreative
Generate high-converting ad creatives in seconds—AdCreative AI produces hundreds of variations optimized for performance.
HeyGen
Create professional video content at scale with AI avatars—HeyGen lets you produce personalized videos without cameras, crews, or studios.
Scalenut
Research, write, and optimize SEO content in one platform—Scalenut generates keyword clusters, outlines, and drafts that rank faster than manual methods.
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