Manus is locked out for some accounts until August 25th, and Google just quietly changed two ad products. Here’s what actually affects your business this week

Welcome to the AI Industry Report, the daily brief built by AI, about AI, from the Agentic Marketing Academy. It’s Monday, August 24th. Four stories today, and the first one is about following the money instead of the headlines to figure out which AI company is actually winning right now. Let’s go.

If you only pay attention to which chatbot everyone’s talking about, you’d have missed this one. Perplexity’s annualized revenue just crossed 750 million dollars, up from under 250 million at the start of the year, more than tripling in about eight months. A report from The Information, corroborated by Reuters, also says Nvidia is now in talks to invest at a valuation north of 30 billion dollars, over 50 percent above where Perplexity sat a year ago. Neither company confirmed those talks, so treat the investment as reported, not done. The revenue number is the real story, and a good chunk of that growth traces to Perplexity Computer, its cloud based agent that automates real work for professionals. Sound familiar? It should. This is the second AI company in a week to post a jump like this. Anthropic’s run rate passed 65 billion dollars in the story we covered last Wednesday. Different company, same pattern: growth is coming from agents doing actual work, not more people chatting. If you’re picking which AI tools deserve real budget, track that number, not app store rankings. Source: The Information, reporting August 23rd, corroborated by Reuters.

Now, a deadline we flagged two weeks ago just landed, and the shape of it is a little different than we first described. Back on August 12th, we told you Manus was splitting from Meta and affected users needed to back up their data before August 23rd. That date passed, and here’s the important nuance: this isn’t Manus down for everyone. Manus’s own help center says it’s a regional lockout, accounts tied to the regulatory unwind of the Meta deal, concentrated in specific jurisdictions, lost access entirely while that data gets deleted. If you’re not in one of those accounts, Manus is working exactly like normal, including a separate, unrelated free-access promo on its 1.6 and 1.6 Lite modes running through the 25th. If you do hit a maintenance screen instead of your workspace, that’s the deletion window, not a glitch, and access returns August 25th at 8 a.m. Singapore time.

Two quick ones from Google to close out. First, Local Services Ads got a lot more specific. Google broke old generic categories like “Restaurant” or “Auto repair” into dozens of granular options, added pre badge ads that let you collect leads while still finishing onboarding, and widened which categories get excluded from the Verified badge to include auto, beauty, and dining. If you run a home service, auto, beauty, or restaurant business, your actual category might exist for the first time. Worth a look in your LSA dashboard this week. Source: Google’s own Local Services Ads help documentation, changes spotted August 21st.

And Google Ads picked up new tools for AI Max: multi campaign A-B testing of budgets rolling out in September, the ability to test AI Max with your brand and location controls still turned on, and a Performance Planner that now forecasts a bidding or budget change and applies it in one click. If brand safety was your excuse for not testing AI Max, that excuse is gone. Source: Google’s own Ads and Commerce blog, published August 20th.

So here’s your one thing for today. If your business leans on any single AI tool the way some of you lean on Manus, write down which of your files only live inside it. That’s the list you’ll want backed up before the next transition, not during it.

That’s today’s report. Transcript and every source linked at A I industry report dot com.

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