Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of the ambitious AI startup Perplexity, has a clear and startling vision for the future of work. It begins with a simple prompt and ends with the automation of entire professional roles.
“A recruiter’s work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs,” Srinivas stated in a recent interview with The Verge’s Decoder” podcast, a prediction that serves as both a mission statement for his new AI-powered browser, Comet, and a stark warning for the modern knowledge worker.
His company is at the forefront of a new technological arms race to build not just a smarter search engine, but a true AI agent. Think of it as a digital entity capable of carrying out complex, multi-step tasks from start to finish. According to Srinivas, the most natural place for this revolution to begin is the one tool every office worker already uses: the web browser. And the first jobs in its sights are those of recruiters and executive assistants.
The Automation of Expertise
For years, the promise of AI has been to assist, not replace. But the vision Srinivas lays out is one of replacement by a vastly more capable assistant. He describes an AI agent as something that can “carry out any workflow end to end, from instruction to actual completion of the task.”
He details exactly how Comet is being designed to absorb the core functions of a recruiter. The agent can be tasked to find a list of all engineers who studied at Stanford and previously worked at Anthropic, port that list to a Google Sheet with their LinkedIn URLs, find their contact information, and then “bulk draft personalized cold emails to each of them to reach out to for a coffee chat.”
The same logic applies to the work of an executive assistant. By having secure, client-side access to a user’s logged-in applications like Gmail and Google Calendar, the agent can take over the tedious back-and-forth of scheduling. “If some people respond,” Srinivas explains, the agent can “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.”
This is a fundamental re-imagining of productivity, where the human role shifts from performing tasks to simply defining their outcomes.
A Six-Month Horizon
While Comet cannot execute these most complex, “long-horizon” tasks perfectly today, Srinivas is betting that the final barriers are about to fall. He is pinning his timeline on the imminent arrival of the next generation of powerful AI.
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