Perplexity AI CEO and founder Aravind Srinivas said on Friday that the startup’s Comet browser can boost productivity so that companies won’t need extra employees.
“Instead of hiring one more person on your team, you could just use Comet to supplement all the work that you’re doing,” Srinivas told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The CEO said the artificial intelligence-powered web browser is a “true personal assistant” that allows users to complete more tasks in the same amount of time and said that the productivity gained could be worth $10,000 per year for a single person.
AI is already being deployed across businesses to save headcount and make operations more efficient, but the labor impact has so far been “limited,” according to Goldman Sachs chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius.
Srinivas estimated that the value of “human digital knowledge work” contributes around $25 trillion to the gross domestic product, so a 20% gain in productivity could easily amount to $5 trillion in GDP growth.
Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee agreed with Srinivas that AI could be a boon to the overall GDP if it can raise productivity growth and service, but cautioned about massive AI infrastructure spending.
“We should think about what happens if the growth rate of AI is not as large as its biggest proponents think,” Goolsbee told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” later Friday. “Might we get over our skis a bit with over-investment and have to clean up if there were a bubble? I think we do want to think about that topic.”
Data center demand hasn’t yet shown signs of stopping as tech companies have continued to bolster AI investments.
Megacaps like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet are looking to spend as much as $320 billion combined on AI technologies and datacenter expansions in 2025.
Perplexity initially launched Comet in July to users with Perplexity Max, which costs $200 per month, garnering a waitlist of millions of people, the company said. The browser became available to download for free on Thursday to everyone worldwide.
Comet can browse the internet to assist with research and asynchronously perform multiple tasks.
“It’s truly about delivering value and you being able to delegate tasks to it,” Srinivas said.
Other tech companies have also been rolling out their own AI browser assistants.
In January, OpenAI introduced its web agent, Operator, and Google released Gemini AI to its Chrome browser in September.
