DIGITAL ROUNDUP

Meta acquires Manus to accelerate its AI intentions

Meta ended the year with a somewhat unpredicted acquisition. Meta announced its acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based startup that specialises in "general purpose AI agents”. The deal closed at the end of December and is rumoured to being in the multi billion figures.

This is quite the big move from a company that already boasts several AI paths, including their own conversational based AI solution (Meta AI) & Llama as a LLM based approach. The move towards Manus signals a move towards execution of agentic outcomes vs just displaying an output, such as text or images.

In the ads space, Meta has been moving towards an agentic future already. There already exists more chatbot form Business AI, aimed at smaller advertisers to onboard onto ads with some form of support where required. Generative AI has been a key component of new dynamic ad options encompassed around Advantage+. And the base algorithm itself has been powered by the likes of Lattice, GEM & Andromeda machine learning models, evolving over time.

Whilst Manus will likely play a bigger role in opening up executional agentic workflows for regular users of Meta’s universe of apps, there is an ads implication that follows the vision of Zuck’s ambition to make the ads experience 100% agentic. How quickly this will happen will remain to be seen, but the likelihood of prompting ad build / optimisation from a brief to execution through a Manus like approach is no doubt one of the biggest use cases.