Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas thinks the future of AI isn’t in chatbots but in your browser. And he said it’s coming for two roles that every modern workplace depends on: recruiters and administrative assistants.
On Thursday’s episode of The Verge’s “Decoder” podcast, Srinivas explained how his company’s new AI-native browser, Comet, is designed not just to help people browse the web, but to fully automate knowledge work.
“A recruiter’s work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs,” he said.
He described how Comet’s built-in AI agent can access apps like Gmail, LinkedIn, and Google Calendar to generate candidate lists, pull contact information, and send personalized outreach emails — tasks typically handled by recruiting coordinators and sourcers.
Srinivas also believes Comet can take over many of an executive assistant’s day-to-day duties, including email triage, calendar management, and meeting prep.
“You want it to keep following up, keep a track of their responses,” he said.
“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.”
Eventually, Srinivas believes Comet will evolve into an AI operating system for white-collar workers — one that continuously runs tasks in the background and executes commands from natural language prompts.
While Comet is still invite-only and available to premium users, Srinivas bets that people will pay for AI that does meaningful work.
“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?”
Tech leaders are split on whether AI will replace or reinvent white-collar jobs
Perplexity’s CEO isn’t alone in predicting a wave of disruption to white collar jobs from AI.
Halil Sagirkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images
Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, has predicted that AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level jobs within five years.
Speaking to Axios in May, he said the public was unaware of the scale of what’s coming and that companies and the government are “sugarcoating” the risks in fields like finance, law, consulting, and tech.
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Ford CEO Jim Farley echoed that view at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month, saying: “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US.”
But not everyone agrees with the apocalyptic take.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff framed AI as an augmentation tool rather than a replacement engine.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a similar point, telling reporters at Vivatech in June: “Do I think AI will change jobs? It will change everyone’s — it’s changed mine.”
Even among more bullish voices, there is broad consensus that change is coming fast and that workers must adapt or risk obsolescence.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a public staff memo that generative AI would reduce the company’s white-collar workforce, urging them to “educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can.”
Perplexity’s Srinivas issued a similar warning on a podcast episode by Matthew Berman on Friday.
“People who are at the frontier of using AI are going to be way more employable than people who are not,” he said. “That’s guaranteed to happen.”
