‘Just one prompt’: Perplexity CEO says his AI browser can replace two key roles every workplace depends on
San Francisco based AI startup Perplexity has been taking the competition to Google first with its generative AI backed search engine and now with a native AI browser called Comet. However, it’s not just Google’s lunch money that Perplexity is after, the company’s CEO Aravind Srinivas in a recent interview with The Verge revealed that there are at least two white collar jobs that Perplexity’s Comet browser should be able to take away soon.
What are these two roles then? Well, it’s the roles the roles that any workplace normally relies on, recruiters and administrative assistants.
In the latest episode of The Verge’s “Decoder” podcast, Srinivas explained how Comet will eventually be able to replace the job of a recruiter after the introduction of a bettter reasoning model like a GPT-5 or Claude 4.5.
“A recruiter’s work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs. And then you’ve got to do state tracking.” Srinivas said on the podcast.
“you want it to keep following up, keep a track of their responses. If some people respond, go and update the Google Sheets, mark the status as responded or in progress and follow up with those candidates, sync with my Google calendar, and then resolve conflicts and schedule a chat, and then push me a brief ahead of the meeting. Some of these things should be proactive. It doesn’t even have to be a prompt.” he added
Sinivas also notes that Perplexity has the ambition to make its Comet browser feel more like an operating system which runs processes like these in the background and implements commands based on natural language prompts.
Comet browser is currently only available to Perplexity’s paying customers but the company has also opened invites for free users who should get access to the AI powered product in due time. In a Reddit AMA session earlier in the week, Srinivas had confirmed that Comet browser will be available for even free users but some of the AI powered agentic tasks could be under a paywall.
During the latest podcast Srinivas showed optimism in the possibility that users would want to pay for Comet in the long run because of the funtionality it offers.
“And at scale, if it helps you to make a few million bucks, does it not make sense to spend $2,000 for that prompt? It does, right? So I think we’re going to be able to monetize in many more interesting ways than chatbots for the browser.” he added.
