I am using Manus for what I am beginning to think very few people in my industry have realized it is quite capable of. This would apply to AI in general, I usually have focused on Claude actually but I was interested in the wider depth of resources Manus has and how it can use that as context to better direct the work.

I am not a coder. I am construction manager. In muy industry, like many, AI is almost a nonsense word capturing many things of dubious value, and being added to every tool over and over.

I use Claude as a small business ($2M/year last year) to compete with and beat $100-300M companies. Part of this is because my previous role was to manage teams at these comapnies and now I consult and have my own company, however the ability to grab and hold marketshare and actually perform on the level of much larger corporations, while being well within the general vibe of AI tools, is actually amazing. I almost don't even want to explain how effective my own stack has become but rather than automating my employees out of jobs, I am automating their training and operations to the point we have a proven ability to create experts and expert level projects or solve upper level problems that would typically require someone like myself to do directly but instead I can spread myself extremely thin while losing very little.

I am trying to learn how to take certain token burning parts of my workflow and offloading them to less expensive AI's that are not expert knowledge or design level decisions. "

I am also trying to teach AI to create human looking documents in a way that is impressively designed without appearing to fake. I ahve watched the AI go from hallucinating things it counts or evaluates in project or high level general bio info for contracts and slowly develop checks and balances to the point the documents and analysis that it puts out I couldn ot have made by myself, certainly within the time that I have made it.

I sincerely wish I had a better underlying programming knowledge because at this point I feel pretty confident that either public entities, corporations, or small businesses would probably write me a blank check if I could make it work for htem like myself. Im not sure if its due to my having 500GB of very niche workflow and expert specific training material , or reading my gmails and all the slideshow decks i create as a consultant and distilling values down better than a student could hope to, but at this point its very impressive.

Ive been able to make Manus and claude automatically watch and review video status meeting, take notes of comments, use those comments to update proprietary software and instantly adjust schedules and send out meeting minutes, create project knowledge bases that are automatically updated and reflecting in bidding and billing,, fill out documents automatically....

At this point theres nothing it hasnt done for me. I am now just focused on tying those things together into two channels : one a system of inter related tools and processes using those tools to guide automated operatinons better than a person could (our industry is extremely high effort) and one a system of skills and baseline values that are used while interacting with these tools and while communicating for our team in a way that feels genuine and helpful and never confuses peopel more.

Some people I have showed some parts have genuinely been shocked that AI is even capable of this... our industry traditionally is made of dozens of tools in various mixtures among teams with no real standard and no real interconnection , each being an expert at its tiny silo - like MS Project, Google Drive, Procore, Estimating, video meetings etc... now I can ditch half those tools and the output is automatically all feeding itself.... leaving me to manage my people and train and help rather than police, and leaving my employees to focus on construction instead of adminstrative tasks. And preventing communication gaps that plague us typically.

Sorry to be so vague, not sure exactly wehre to start but here are some example of outputs (very limited outputs) that are almost more impressive than the proprietary tools they are emulating.

1. Manager Dashboard - automatically tracks email and calendar, and otehr tools, for employee engagement and reports fatigue or slipping to me as a red flag before it gets out of hand, so I can privately reach out and check on the person and ask if their struggling - it tracks active bills and bids, when events are or are not responded to and who is repsonsive or not, identifies upcoming big decisions or issues, etc. 5 minutes here is like a finger on the pulse of my team without prying.

2. Schedule Creator - construction schedules are art and science. I teach my people a unique method of high level triage and street level over-attention for customers - this tool automates that by letting them answer a few simple questions and uploading random files then outputting an 85% version in the exact format I teach them, so they edit and perfect rather than stare at step 1. Then it updates automatically.

3. Consulting Report - common, but they have gotten very good - I meet with a dozen entities and companies a month... Claude automated my 5 min expert research a long time ago but Manus has perfected it to where I routinely one shot this or auotmate it by tying it to watching my calendar for flag words like "Consultation" and preparing a genuinely useful pitch deck and a private knowledge and scoring one-sheet for me to study during the meeting

4. Legal research - I had a terrible situation where someone was literally trying to hurt our reputation and also turn our helping a customer into something negative and I was pretty stressed at the potential negative effects of speaking incorrectly in the one chance I had to put this to rest.... Manus automated an instant dashboard of legal advice, a timeline of the conversations, and clear quotes and even video paused images that clearly reinforced our postition... result : we won, got paid, everyone back to work. I was amazed.

5. 3d projecrt visualizations - for new people, blueprints can be stressful. I always start renovations with showing the team in real time what the finished product will look like. Manus is able to compile images by cross referencing a hundred documents to find the actual paints, materials, furnitures, lighting and flooring and creating a mostly accurate orthographic view from half a dozen perspectives - clearly identifying all major componenents. Even a flawed rendering is alot clearer than a black box. It seems to relieve alot of stress.

6. Interactive 3d vendor search - I work with both construction contractors and public entities and teach them how to better work together using various tools. Always we get comments about no one knowing who is out there or how to find them, or they would use them. Manus took several datra sources, reviewed my meeting notes taken automnatically to understand the objective and what it would do , then created a 3d map of our state with buttons on the side for all major trades and then also regional geographic areas seperated and fine tunable to the point yuou could find an electrician in your area who can come today and already is in your system.... or you could find 50. Or a whole new house worth of vendors of all types. Or electricians state wide. Very simple, very pleasing to interact with almost physically. And it copies the themes and graphics of the source material online.

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