Lisbon – Live from Web Summit 2026. Web Summit 2026 opened on Monday evening in Lisbon, and the first interview on its Centre Stage went to Manus, the startup that made general-purpose AI agents a category. On stage was Tao Zhang, co-founder and Chief Product Officer, with a line that sums up how the company now works and hires: “AI is already good at doing things. So we don’t need more people who are only good at doing things.”
The one-to-one session, titled “The age of agents”, was hosted by Web Summit co-host Casey Lau. Zhang opened with a joke: “Happy to be the first human guest speaker. But I can’t dance.” Lau then noted it was his first time speaking since “everything went down with Meta”. Zhang kept it short: “When you run a startup, there are many problems you have to solve. […] Right now we’re focusing on the future.”
Robots on the Centre Stage on the opening night of Web Summit 2026 in Lisbon. Photo: The Cryptonomist
From a computer to a phone number, an email and a wallet
Manus launched in March 2025 as a general-purpose agent and, in Zhang’s words, “somehow defined this category” by giving the AI its own computer to complete long, human-type tasks with a single agent. Twenty months later, he said, “giving agents a computer is already common sense”.
The next step came with Manus 2.0, presented at the end of September. Zhang listed what the company’s agents can now do: “We gave our agent a phone number, so it can call people and send and read messages. We gave the agent an email address, so it can register services by itself or handle emails. Not your emails: its own emails.” And a digital wallet, so that “with your permission, it can already buy things for you”. According to the official announcement, these features belong to Cue, the personal-agent app launched alongside Manus 2.0, where spending stays within a budget set by the user.
A to-do list of 30 items, run by an agent
The most personal part of the talk was about Zhang’s own mornings. “I’m a typical ADHD person,” he said. “The hardest part of my daily life is not a hard problem. It’s getting started.” Every morning, he said, 20 or 30 to-dos are waiting for him: at 15 minutes each, that would be about 300 minutes a day. “Six months ago I would just ignore them and pretend they’re not there.”
Now he hands the whole list to Manus, which splits it into tasks. For each one the agent either asks him for more context or lets him assign it to a team member. In that case Manus sends the colleague a Slack message with the background it has gathered from the company’s Notion, Slack and Gmail: “My teammates will not just get a one-liner to-do, but full background research.” Lau called it a chief of staff; Zhang preferred “my PMO”.
Hiring: four hours with Manus instead of a coding test
Asked how Manus will hire in 2027, Zhang said the change began this March. The company no longer gives engineering candidates a traditional coding exam. Instead it asks them “to use Manus to solve a problem in four hours”, then reviews the session together with them “to see if this candidate is used to working with AI”.
Inside the company, roles have largely disappeared. The careers page still lists frontend and backend engineers, but internally “everyone can do everything”: in the product and marketing team Zhang runs, everyone commits code to the codebase and does design, and the designers write code. Job titles? “Literally, we don’t value titles. We value people who can get things done.”
A video from fewer than 30 words
The session ended with a demo of Manus 2.0’s video tools (Manus Studio). Zhang said his prompt was shorter than 30 words: research Web Summit 2026 and make a 30-second video. The result was played on the Centre Stage screens and drew a round of applause.
The Meta background
Meta announced the acquisition of Manus at the end of December 2025, in a deal that press reports valued at over $2 billion. China opened a review in January 2026 and on April 27 ordered the deal to be unwound. On September 1 Manus announced it had “formally resumed independent operations” under its founding team, and on September 28 it launched Manus 2.0 and Cue.
