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 markete…