🇩🇪 Build your own AI agents with this hyped tool from Germany

Hi AInauts,

Welcome to the latest issue of your favorite newsletter! It's great when the AI gods are with us. We had planned something on AI agents anyway and were rewarded with exciting agent news from China.

So today's topic: AI agents (and how everyone can build their own).

Here's what we have in store for you:

• 🇨🇳 China AI agent has the world talking again

• 🇩🇪 Build your own AI agents with this hyped tool from Germany

• 😅 AI-Fun: China AI vs. US/EU AI in two news headlines

P.S. Before we get started, a quick word on our own behalf. On May 14, 2025, it's time again for the RISE OF AI conference in Berlin! We were there last year and can say: it's one of the most exciting AI conferences there is! What's special this year is that there will be a AInauten get-together at the conference, where we can meet and chat in person.

We have also managed to get a small contingent of tickets with a 20% discount for AInauts at. Click here for the tickets. We look forward to meeting some AInauts in person!

🇨🇳 China AI agent has the world talking again

Our ideal AI world has once again been thrown into a brief state of shock: A new AI agent from China has been unveiled! Another DeepSeek moment, then? Before you sell your NVIDIA shares out of panic, let's put this into perspective.

What happened?

As already teased on Monday, Manus was presented on the weekend. According to the development team, it is the first AI agent that is generally applicable. In other words: an agent that can do a wide variety of things. Supports us with everyday tasks. And gets things done independently.

Here you can see the intro video with a few exciting use cases:

According to the creators of Manus, the agent has already completed countless jobs independently on freelance platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr! Manus is also said to be better than the OpenAI operator.

However, this video here has gone viral, showing how Manus allegedly operates, posts, interacts etc. with several X accounts autonomously at the same time.

Yay, social bots send their regards!

The cool thing is that you can always see live what the agent is doing in the browser and can intervene at any time if necessary.

How does Manus work?

To put all the panic and enthusiasm into perspective: Manus seems to be a very well-made, but still quite "normal" AI agent that is equipped with many tools and also uses open-source frameworks.

In other words, there is no secret magic running in the background, but well-known models such as Claude Sonnet, fine-tuned Qwen models and frameworks such as Browser Use etc. are used. Everything has been combined extremely well, paired with good agent prompts, powerful tools and clever workflows.

This has now also been confirmed by the Chief Researcher at Manus AI.

But we don't want to diminish the performance at all, quite the opposite. Manus looks like a great tool! You can try it out here, or put yourself on the waiting list for now.

OpenAI has also just published a new API for Agents & Tools - this is particularly exciting for developers.

But if you want to build your own agent right away, read on…

🇩🇪 Building your own AI agents with a hyped tool from Germany

As you may know, it is a declared goal of ours to completely "automate" ourselves with the help of AI. We've written quite a bit about this in the past and will continue to do so.

The combination of AI and no-code automation tools is an absolute superpower for all non-techies who really want to do something with AI.

In our previous examples, we always used tools like Zapier and Make. These are still great, and we use them every day.

For some time now, however, another automation tool has been extremely hyped. And - who would have thought it - it even comes from Germany!

We're talking about n8n! And today we want to introduce you to the currently most popular skill by showing you how quickly and easily you can use it to build an AI agent.

What is n8n?

Before we dive in, here are the key highlights:

• n8n is a workflow automation tool. It allows you to automate the most complex processes without much programming knowledge.

• You can connect different apps with each other and define exactly what is to be done.

• You can simply click together your workflow with the help of various so-called nodes.

Essentially, a workflow always consists of three nodes:

• Trigger: An event that triggers the workflow

• Processing: Nodes that process data

• Actions: Start activities in other apps

Here is a small overview with examples:

This allows tedious manual tasks to be perfectly automated. And not just simple tasks, but also extremely complex requirements!

n8n is similar to Zapier and Make, but offers two special features:

• It is open source and can be completely self-hosted - and is therefore 100% data protection compliant!

• It is extremely well geared towards the integration of AI workflows.

For precisely these two reasons, we wanted to share it here with all AInauts and show how easy it is.

Your personal AI agent in 3 minutes

The function that is currently being celebrated the most is AI agents.

To put it simply, it works like this:

• First create an account here (14 days free).

• Open a new workflow and select the "On Chat message" trigger as the first step.

This is another great feature of n8n: it has a chat interface built right in. You can integrate your own chat directly into your website or call it up via a URL.

Next, we add an AI agent node using the "+" symbol. You can find these under AI nodes.

Voilà! You have the foundation for an AI agent with which you can chat.

Just add a chat model with another click (e.g. OpenAI GPT-4o) and give it a short-term memory with the window buffer memory.

So far, this is not much different from a normal chatbot.

It gets really exciting and powerful when you give your AI agent "tools"!

Tools are skills. These can be simple things like doing a Google search and processing the results, calculating or performing an action in another app.

But that's not all. You can also let your agent control other agents from you as a tool! Or in other words: You can connect agents in n8n with one click, and you have a small team of AI employees.

Let's take a simple example to illustrate this.

• A supervisor agent controls three other agents.

• An e-mail agent who has access to our e-mails and can also send them himself.

• A copywriter agent who can write and sell convincingly.

• An agent who checks our calendars and arranges appointments.

A perfect use case for this would be the automation of lead management in a sales process:

• The email agent scans incoming inquiries and filters out promising leads.

• The copywriter agent creates personalized reply emails with suitable offers or further information.

• The calendar agent checks the availability of the sales team and automatically suggests suitable appointments for the prospective customer.

This would give you a fully automated, intelligent sales assistant that processes inquiries immediately, provides personalized responses and arranges appointments.

Everything is very simple and can be set up in a short time.

Want to go deeper into AI agents and AI automation?

This article is just to give you a first overview and impression of n8n.

The devil is in the detail, of course. You also need good prompts etc. to make it all work. And of course, n8n also has a certain learning curve... But then the possibilities are almost endless.

Whether it's n8n, Make or Zapier - in our view, AI and automation are THE key skills that matter now.

😅 AI-Fun: China AI vs. US/EU AI in two news headlines

Finally, we leave you with two short headlines that we stumbled across directly below each other. ... Apple is adapting to the European way in terms of AI? 😉 

We made it! But no need to be sad. The AInauts will be back soon, with new stuff for you.

Reto & Fabian from the AInauts

P.S.: Follow us on social media - that motivates us to keep going 😁!
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