Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now
The promise sounds almost too good to be true: drop a messy comma separated values (CSV) file into an AI agent, wait two minutes, and get back a polished, interactive chart ready for your next board presentation.
But that’s exactly what Chinese startup Manus.im is delivering with its latest data visualization feature, launched this month.
Unfortunately, my initial hands-on testing with corrupted datasets reveals a fundamental enterprise problem: impressive capabilities paired with insufficient transparency about data transformations. While Manus handles messy data better than ChatGPT, neither tool is yet ready for boardroom-ready slides.
The spreadsheet problem plaguing enterprise analytics
Rossums’ survey of 470 finance leaders found 58% still rely primarily on Excel for monthly KPIs, despite owning BI licenses. Another TechRadar study estimates that overall spreadsheet dependence affects roughly 90% of organizations — creating a “last-mile data problem” between governed warehouses and hasty CSV exports that land in analysts’ inboxes hours before critical meetings.
The AI Impact Series Returns to San Francisco - August 5 The next phase of AI is here - are you ready? Join leaders from Block, GSK, and SAP for an exclusive look at how autonomous agents are reshaping enterprise workflows - from real-time decision-making to end-to-end automation. Secure your spot now - space is limited: https://bit.ly/3GuuPLF
Manus targets this exact gap. Upload your CSV, describe what you want in natural language, and the agent automatically cleans the data, selects the appropriate Vega-Lite grammar and returns a PNG chart ready for export—no pivot tables required.
Where Manus beats ChatGPT: 4x slower but more accurate with messy data
I tested both Manus and ChatGPT’s Advanced Data Analysis using three datasets (113k-row ecommerce orders, 200k-row marketing funnel 10k-row SaaS MRR), first clean, then corrupted with 5% error injection including nulls, mixed-format dates and duplicates.
... continue reading