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  • #39: Inside the Battle for the Agent Layer: Manus, Zendesk, Google & More

#39: Inside the Battle for the Agent Layer: Manus, Zendesk, Google & More

AgentPulse: Your Weekly Dose of AI Agents News.

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August 01, 2025

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In today’s Agent Pulse:

  • 📢 Top Headlines

  • ⚔️ Agent Arena

  • ✨ Featured Agents

  • 📡 Agent Signals

  • 🎓 Free courses

  • 📚 Must-Read Papers

  • 🗺️ Landscape Map

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📢 TOP Headlines

Manus AI Launches "Wide Research" — A New Chapter in Autonomous Agents

Manus AI has officially released Wide Research, a milestone feature built atop its new agent infrastructure. Here’s what’s new and why it matters.

  • Processes high-volume tasks across hundreds of items in parallel, use cases include comparing Fortune 500 companies or researching GenAI tools.

  • Uses identical Manus agent instances for each sub-task instead of predefined specialized roles, delivering flexibility and consistency.

  • Presents a UI replay of each workflow, showing step-by-step decision paths and tool actions, making agent reasoning transparent.

Wide Research is now live for Pro users, with public rollout planned for Plus and Basic subscribers.

Why It Matters

Beyond single-thread agents
This launch marks a shift from sequential chain-of-thought to parallelized execution. Each sub-agent operates simultaneously and reconvenes, enabling true scale.

Narrative-first agent UX
The replay UI bridges a key gap, agents become auditable processes, not black-box tools. That’s crucial for auditability, debugging, and trust.

Flexible, not rigid roles
Instead of assigning “manager,” “coder,” or “designer” roles, Manus agents standardize execution across tasks, making workflows adaptable to discovery needs.

Builder Takeaways

  • Design for parallelism real-world tasks aren’t linear. Architect agents to run distributed sub-workflows.

  • Make reasoning visible agents are moving from emergence to explanation. UIs must expose the chain-of-action.

  • Don’t over-optimize for narrow roles flexible generalist agents adapt better to dynamic tasks than preset specialists.

Wide Research offers a fresh agentic architecture: flexible, scalable, and transparent. It raises the bar and hints at what the next generation of multi-agent platforms should feel like, much more than chatbots, closer to digital teams.

Zendesk Launches Real AI Agents for Email & Web Support

Zendesk just took a major step forward in making AI agents a core part of customer service, not just assistants, but autonomous solvers.

What’s New:

  • AI Agents for Email (Advanced Tier): Now live. These agents can autonomously resolve over 50% of incoming emails using Zendesk’s help center content, past tickets, and integrated knowledge sources. Responses are fully customized to your brand tone and policy.

  • No-Code Agent Builder: Build and deploy agents across email, web, chat, and beyond, using natural language instructions, App Builder workflows, and deep integrations with Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and more.

  • Transparency & Control: Admins get real-time visibility into agent reasoning, outcome tracking, and audit logs, enabling safe rollout in high-stakes environments.

Why This Matters:

Zendesk isn’t just automating responses, it’s deploying fully agentic systems designed for resolution, not conversation.

  • From Chatbots to Case Closers: Email is one of the hardest support channels to automate, high volume, nuanced, and often critical. Zendesk’s agents now handle it head-on.

  • Governance as a Feature: Full oversight into AI decisions, fallback handling, and step-by-step logic means these agents are built for real-world accountability.

  • Outcome-Based Pricing: You only pay for actual resolutions, not just AI replies. This shifts the AI model from assistive to results-driven.

Why You Should Pay Attention:

Zendesk just redefined what a real customer support agent looks like:

  • Agents that take actions, not just suggest them.

  • Agents built with reasoning traceability, not black-box models.

  • Agents designed for core channels like email, not just chat widgets.

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✨ Featured Agents

📡 Agent Signals

  • Observe Inc. closed a $156 million Series C funding round to advance its AI-powered observability platform, which uses a data lake, knowledge graph, and AI SRE to help enterprises troubleshoot faster and more affordably. Source

  • Klover.ai introduced Artificial General Decision-Making, a human-centric, multi-agent AI system for enterprise decision intelligence. Source

  • Datavault AI launched enterprise commercialization for its AI agents, DataScore® and DataValue®, built with IBM watsonx.ai, to streamline financial modeling and data monetization. Source

  • Astrocade launched an AI agent-powered game creation experience, enabling users to brainstorm, edit, and remix games with AI-guided tools and specialized AI agents for visuals, UI, narrative, audio, and mechanics. Source

  • Zendesk announced the rollout of AI agents for email and web forms, providing instant, conversational answers to common customer questions and reducing support effort. Source

  • Noma Security raised $100 million in Series B funding to accelerate the adoption of its unified platform for AI and agent security, addressing the critical need for securing agentic AI. Source

  • Blue Planet launched AI Studio, a platform designed to turn agentic AI vision into reality for OSS teams, enabling the design, testing, and deployment of AI pipelines and agents for telecom network operations. Source

  • Google Cloud announced an upgrade to its Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, releasing version 0.3 with enhanced stability and a comprehensive developer toolkit for building, deploying, evaluating, and selling A2A agents. Source

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📚 Must Read Papers

  1. AWS: Agentic AI frameworks (Doc)

  2. KPMG: AI Quarterly Pulse Survey: Q2 2025 (Doc)

  3. Stanford University: Future of Work with AI Agents (Doc)

  4. Google: Guide for using AI at work (Doc)

  5. Google: An Introduction to AI Agent Security (Doc)

  6. Thomson Reuters: Agentic AI 101 (Doc)

  7. OpenAI: A Practical Guide to building Agents (Doc)

  8. BCG: AI at Work (Doc)

  9. ServiceNow: Enterprise AI Maturity Index 2025 (Doc)

  10. IBM: Agentic AI in Financial Services (Doc)

  11. Capgemini: Rise of Agentic AI (Doc)

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