Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of the bold AI startup Perplexity, has a transparent and startling imaginative and prescient for the way forward for work. It begins with a easy immediate and ends with the automation of complete skilled roles.
“A recruiter’s work value one week is only one immediate: sourcing and attain outs,” Srinivas acknowledged in a latest interview with The Verge’s Decoder” podcast, a prediction that serves as each a mission assertion for his new AI-powered browser, Comet, and a stark warning for the trendy data employee.
His firm is on the forefront of a brand new technological arms race to construct not only a smarter search engine, however a real AI agent. Consider it as a digital entity able to finishing up advanced, multi-step duties from begin to end. In response to Srinivas, essentially the most pure place for this revolution to start is the one instrument each workplace employee already makes use of: the online browser. And the primary jobs in its sights are these of recruiters and government assistants.
The Automation of Experience
For years, the promise of AI has been to help, not exchange. However the imaginative and prescient Srinivas lays out is one among substitute by a vastly extra succesful assistant. He describes an AI agent as one thing that may “perform any workflow finish to finish, from instruction to precise completion of the duty.”
He particulars precisely how Comet is being designed to soak up the core capabilities of a recruiter. The agent may be tasked to discover a listing of all engineers who studied at Stanford and beforehand labored at Anthropic, port that listing to a Google Sheet with their LinkedIn URLs, discover their contact data, after which “bulk draft customized chilly emails to every of them to succeed in out to for a espresso chat.”
The identical logic applies to the work of an government assistant. By having safe, client-side entry to a person’s logged-in functions like Gmail and Google Calendar, the agent can take over the tedious back-and-forth of scheduling. “If some folks reply,” Srinivas explains, the agent can “go and replace the Google Sheets, mark the standing as responded or in progress and comply with up with these candidates, sync with my Google calendar, after which resolve conflicts and schedule a chat, after which push me a short forward of the assembly.”
This can be a elementary re-imagining of productiveness, the place the human function shifts from performing duties to easily defining their outcomes.
A Six-Month Horizon
Whereas Comet can not execute these most advanced, “long-horizon” duties completely at this time, Srinivas is betting that the ultimate limitations are about to fall. He’s pinning his timeline on the upcoming arrival of the following technology of highly effective AI.
“I’m betting on progress in reasoning fashions to get us there,” he says, referencing upcoming fashions like GPT-5 or Claude 4.5. He believes these new AI brains will present the ultimate push wanted to make seamless, end-to-end automation a actuality.
His timeline is aggressive and must be a wake-up name for anybody in these professions. “I’m fairly positive six months to a yr from now, it could do the complete factor,” he predicts. This implies that the disruption isn’t a far-off summary idea however an impending actuality that might reshape complete departments earlier than the top of subsequent yr.
From Browser to OS: A New Layer of Automation
Srinivas’s ambition extends far past constructing a greater browser. He envisions a future the place this instrument evolves into one thing far more integral to our digital lives.
“That’s the extent to which we’ve an ambition to make the browser into one thing that feels extra like an OS the place these are processes which can be operating on a regular basis,” he says.
On this new paradigm, the browser is not a passive window to the web however an lively, clever layer that manages your work within the background. Customers may “launch a bunch of Comet assistant jobs” after which, as Srinivas places it, spend their time on different issues whereas the AI works. This transforms the very nature of workplace work from a sequence of lively inputs to a strategy of delegation and oversight.
Liberation or Mass Displacement?
What occurs to the human employee when their job capabilities are condensed right into a single immediate? Srinivas gives an optimistic view, suggesting that this newfound effectivity will release humanity’s time and a focus. He believes folks will spend extra time on leisure and private enrichment, that they are going to “select to spend it on leisure greater than mental work.” In his imaginative and prescient, AI does the drudgery, and we get extra time to “chill and scroll via X or no matter social media they like.”
However this utopian view sidesteps the extra rapid and painful financial query: What occurs to the hundreds of thousands of individuals whose livelihoods are constructed on performing the very duties these brokers are designed to automate? Whereas some could also be elevated to the function of “AI orchestrator,” many may face displacement.
The AI agent, as described by one among its chief architects, is just not merely a brand new function. It’s a catalyst for a profound and probably brutal transformation of the white-collar workforce. The way forward for work is being written in code, and in line with Srinivas, the primary draft will likely be prepared far earlier than most of us suppose.
