ChatGPT is out Manus is in

Welcome to Jam Packed Business Made Easy with AI. My name is Robin Anderson and I'm the CEO of JAM AI. At JAM AI, we have a community where we are training thousands of small business owners every week on how to use applicable and everyday AI. In this podcast, we're focusing on the human side of AI. We're interviewing members of our community and understanding how they're using AI to save more time and make more money. We also practice what we preach. Every Monday, we're generating a podcast from our AI agent. You're going to love it. We have way too much content and not enough time to record, so it's helping us get this information to you. We'll buckle up, take some notes and listen to what we're about to tell you. And if you want to know more, you can join us free for 7 days in Club Jam by going to Jamout AI for more information.

Chat GPT is old news.

Whoa. Okay. That is. That's a bold way to start.

Right? And I gotta be honest, when I first saw that in our notes this morning, I rolled my eyes so hard, I was like, come on, it has.

That, that tech hype, clickbait feel to it, doesn't it?

Totally. Because, you know, I use ChatGPT every single day. My team uses it. It is not old news to, like, 99% of the planet.

It's still the thing that blows people's minds for sure.

Exactly. So my skepticism meter just went way up. But then. But then I started digging into what we're actually looking at today, this platform called Manus, and I realized the statement isn't that ChatGPT is, you know, bad, it's that the way we use it, that little chat box might be becoming obsolete.

That's the key distinction. It's not about the intelligence being old, it's about the workflow, the whole chat paradigm.

Yeah, we're moving from just chatting with a bot to actually building with a system.

That's a great way to put it.

And that's what I want to get into. You know, we're doing a deep dive on manuscript, but I don't just want to geek out on features. I want to know if this actually changes my Tuesday morning.

Right. Is it just another tool you have to learn? Because nobody has the bandwidth for that.

I have zero bandwidth. If anything, the promise of Manus, from what I'm reading here, is that it's supposed to be the antidote to that feeling.

The 50 tabs open, copy, pasting your life away feeling.

Oh, the worst. I call it the Frankenstein workflow. I go to ChatGPT for text, then I bounce over to Midjourney for an image, then somewhere else for code.

And you are the bridge. You are the human API connecting all these things that don't talk to each other.

It's context switching. Hell, it's so draining.

Well, that is exactly where Manus is trying to plant its flag. The source material calls it an all in one platform.

A phrase which, as we said, makes me deeply suspicious. All in one usually means master of none.

It often means it does five things poorly instead of one thing. Well, historically, yes.

So what's actually in the box here? What are we talking about?

Okay, so the source lists four pillars. It's an LLM, so it does the tech stuff. It's a researcher, so it has live web access. It's a designer, so it generates visuals. And this is the weird one, it's a Vibe coding platform.

Vibe coding. I saw that and I have to admit, I kind of hate it. It sounds like something a Gen Z founder came up with over Matcha.

It does sound a little buzzwordy, doesn't it?

So. So what on earth does it mean in, like, a practical sense?

Okay, so strip away the branding. Think about how you build software now. You need syntax, right? Python, JavaScript. You miss one semicolon, the whole thing breaks.

Which is why I am not a coder.

Oh, exactly. Vibe coding is trying to change that. It means you describe the vibe, the intention, the outcome, the feeling in natural language. And the AI handles the syntax.

So you stop being the writer of the code and you become the director of the scene.

That's it. So you could say I want a calculator for freelancers to figure out their hourly rate and make it look moody and dark.

And it just does that? Yeah, it doesn't just give me a block of code to figure out what to do with.

Theoretically, yes. And because it's all in one, it renders it right there. It designs the interface because it's a designer, and it writes the logic because it's a Vibe coder.

Okay, that is a pretty big shift because that really does solve the Frankenstein problem.

It keeps the short term memory of the project all in one place.

Right, but before we get too carried away, there is a giant elephant in the room. We have to talk about the source material. Dropped a huge piece of news.

Mm? The acquisition?

Yeah, this isn't some scrappy startup anymore. They were bought by Meta.

As in Zuckerberg. As in Facebook. The very same.

Success. Is that good news? I Mean? My gut reaction is nervousness. When a giant buys a cool little tool, they either crush it or bloat.

It with ads, which is a totally valid and healthy skepticism. But the source material makes a different argument. They see it as validation.

How so?

Well, think about it from a business perspective. Are you going to invest weeks of your team's time training on a tool that might just run out of money and disappear in six months?

That's a real fear. I've been burned by that before.

Exactly. The meta acquisition, for better or worse, signals stability. It means unlimited servers, unlimited resources. The source says that since the deal features are expanding in ways I couldn't imagine.

So the argument is, you might not love the parent company, but you'll love the infrastructure they're paying for.

In a nutshell, it means this is positioning itself to be a dominant utility, not just a niche experiment.

Okay, I can see the logic. I don't have to love it, but I get it. But let's pivot, because that's all just news. I want to talk about utility. Right. The part of the research that really made me sit up and pay attention wasn't the vibe coding. It was a specific feature called skills.

Yes. This is the crux of it. This is what separates menace from just being another chatbot.

So break it down. What is a skill? Because that's a pretty generic word.

To get it, you have to look at how we use AI. Right now, we use what you could call one off prompts.

Right? I need an email for this client. I type it in, get an answer, copy it, close a tab, done.

And then three days later, you need another email for a different client. So you type the prompt all over again. You start from zero every single time.

When you put it that way, it sounds so inefficient, I feel a little called out.

We all do it. It's how we learned. But a skill in Manus is an attempt to capture that entire process and freeze it. It's about building a repeatable asset.

So you're not just asking for an output, you're teaching the AI the.

The less they're a recipe. That's the perfect metaphor.

Okay, let's make this tangible. The source mentioned proposals and estimates. Let's walk through that, because everyone listening hates doing those.

It's the universal drudgery of business, for sure. So, okay, your current process, you have a template in Google Docs, probably a spreadsheet with pricing. An email from the client.

Right. So I open the template, I do a save as I copy the client's name from the email, paste it in, go to the spreadsheet, calculate the hours.

And all the while you're terrified you're gonna leave the old client's name in there by accident.

The find and replace anxiety. It's absolutely terrifying. I have definitely done that.

So that whole dance takes what, 30 minutes, an hour? And it's boring, but you have to be super focused.

It's the definition of robot work.

Exactly. Now, in Manus, you would build a proposal skill. You do it once, you upload your template, you upload your pricing logic. Like if the client needs video, add this line item, you give it three examples of winning proposals. So it learns your voice.

So I'm frontloading all that work, I'm training it on the rules of the game.

You are training it once. And then when a new client comes along, you just open your proposal skill. It prompts you for the inputs. Who's the client? What do they need? You feed it the raw notes and it generates the whole thing.

And because it's all in one, it's not just text, it's the actual formatted document.

That's the goal. It can do the layout, it can do the math. That one hour task just became a three minute review task.

See, that is where the light bulb goes on. It shifts the whole mindset from I'm using AI to write this sentence to I am managing an AI agent that owns this task.

Owns the task. That is the key phrase. You're delegating, not just collaborating, which is.

So empowering, because if I save those three hours a week, it's not just time, it's decision fatigue.

And think about consistency. If you have a team, you don't write a long document on how to do estimates. You just say, use the estimate skill.

Wow, that turns a best practice into code. It turns the standard into software.

It really does. The source material mentioned that there was a training on this, specifically in something called Club Jam.

Okay, let's pause there. What is Club Jam? It sounds like a Spotify playlist.

It does. It's basically the community hub, the training ground for power users. The source said there's a video walkthrough in there showing exactly how to set up one of these skills, which is.

Important because if I just log in cold, am I going to be totally overwhelmed? Is it going to look like a fighter jet cockpit?

That's always the risk, but that's where the vibe coding part is supposed to help you build the skill by talking to it. You just have to be able to Explain your process clearly.

So if I could explain it to.

A human Internet, you can explain it to Manus. That's the benchmark. If your own process is a mess, the AI can't save you. But if you can articulate it, you can automate it.

If you can articulate it, you can automate it. I like that. That's a bumper sticker.

It's true. The limitation is shifting from the tech to our own clarity.

All right, let's talk brass tacks. Money.

Yeah.

Is this thing going to cost me a mortgage payment?

Surprisingly, no. At least not to start. The source is very clear. It is free to create an account.

Free is my favorite price.

Right. It works on a credit model, like a lot of other tools. You get a certain amount to play with. You can go in, poke around, build a skill, all without a credit card.

So to test the hypothesis, there's zero risk.

Zero risk. And the source's tip of the week was just that. Basically, it was a bluntly, just try it.

I love that. It's not read a white paper. It's go push the buttons.

Because you can't really get it until you feel it work. Until you see it automate something you.

Did yesterday, you have to feel the magic yourself. And you made a good point earlier. With the meta acquisition being so fresh, now is probably the time to get in, I think.

So right now they're in growth mode. They want users, they want feedback. The tool is likely as open and generous as it will ever be.

That's a great point where in the golden era where they're still trying to.

Impress us 100%, we should take advantage of that.

So if we zoom out. We started with this idea that ChatGPT is old news, and I think we've kind of landed on what that actually means.

I think so if you just want a quick chat, it's fine. But if your goal is production, if you want to build a reliable machine that does work for you, then the chat interface is a bottleneck.

It's the difference between a tool you use and a tool you train.

Yes, that's it.

And that's the mental shift. We spend so much time prompting, prompting, prompting. We rarely stop and think, how can I stop prompting and start building?

It's like spending versus investing. A prompt is spending your time. Building a skill is investing your time.

So here's a strategy for everyone listening based on that Club Jam thing. Don't just log in and stare at a blank screen.

The recipe for giving up.

Go find that walkthrough. Watch someone build a proposal skill and just mimic them. Copy the homework.

That's great advice. Learn the muscle memory. Once you get the logic, you'll start seeing opportunities everywhere. You'll be typing an email and think, wait, this is the third time I've written this. This should be a skill.

That's where the freedom comes from. That's how you scale yourself. You stop being the bottleneck.

It lets you operate at a higher level. You become the editor, not the writer, the strategist, not the tactician, which is.

What we all want. Nobody gets into business because they love formatting PDFs.

If you do, that's great. For the rest of us, we want to do the thinking work, not the robot work.

Okay, before we sign off, I want to give everyone a specific challenge. A piece of homework.

Let's hear it.

Look at your calendar or your sent emails from the last week. Find one task you did more than twice. Just one. A status update, a client response, a little report. The boring stuff, the boring, repetitive stuff. Then go create that free Manus account, set a timer for 30 minutes and just try to turn that one task into a skill.

Perfect. Low stakes, high potential reward.

And while you're doing it, ask yourself this question. This is the final thought I want to leave everyone with. Stop asking, what can AI do for me right now?

That's the old question.

It is. The new question is, what repeatable process can I train AI to own forever?

That is the million dollar mindset. If you can answer that, you. You win.

You win. You get your life back. You get your brain back.

Then you beat the burnout.

Exactly. All right, that's it for this deep dive. Go out there, give it a shot, and fire yourself from the robot work.

See you next time.

Bye, everyone.