Aravind Srinivas, the general manager of the ambitious AI -Starting perplexity, has a clear and amazing vision of the future of work. It starts with a simple prompt and ends with the automation of whole professional roles.
“The work of a recruit is worth one week is only one prompt: supply and achievements,” Srinivas stated in a recent interview with The podcast of the Verge decoderA prediction that serves as a mission statement for his new AI-powered browser, comet, and severe warning for the modern knowledge worker.
His company is at the forefront of a new technology weapon race to build not only a smarter search engine, but a real AI agent. Think of it as a digital entity capable of performing complex, multi -step tasks from start to finish. According to Srinivas, the most natural place for this revolution to start is the one tool that every office worker already uses: the browser. And the first work in its sights are those of recruiters and executive helpers.
The automation of expertise
For years, AI’s promise was to help, not replace. But the vision Srinivas exhibits is one of the replacement of a much more capable assistant. He describes AI agent as something that can “carry out any workflow from end to end, from instruction to effective completion of the task.”
He details exactly as a comet is 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 Antropic, port that list to Google sheet with its LinkedIn -Urls, find their contact information, and then “wholesale personal cold emails to each of them to get for KAF chat.”
The same logic applies to the work of an existing assistant. Having a secure, client-side access to user’s logged applications such as Gmail and Google Calendar, the agent can take over the tedious back and forward from programming. “If some people respond,” Srinivas explains, the agent can “go and update the Google sheets, mark the status as answered or in progress and follow with those candidates, synchronize with my Google calendar, and then resolve conflicts and plan chat, and then push me before the meeting.”
This is a fundamental re-imagination of productivity, where the human role changes from performing tasks to simply define their results.
A six-month horizon
While a comet cannot perform these most complex, “long-horizon” tasks perfectly today, Srinivas bet that the final barriers are about to fall. He pinches his timeline about the immediate arrival of the next generation of powerful AI.
“I’m betting on progress in reasoning models to get us there,” he says, referring to upcoming models like GPT-5 or Claude 4.5. He believes that these new AI brains will provide the final push needed to make an incessant, end-to-end automation.
His timeline is aggressive and must be a wake -up call for anyone in these professions. “I’m pretty sure six months to a year from now, it can do the whole thing,” he predicts. This suggests that the interruption is not a distant abstract concept, but an immediate reality that could remodel entire departments by the end of next year.
From browser to OS: A new layer of automation
Srinivas’ ambition extends much more than building a better browser. He envisages a future where this tool evolves into something much more integrated into our digital lives.
“This is the measure in which we have an ambition to make the browser into something that feels more like you, where these are processes that work all the time,” he says.
In this new paradigm, the browser is no longer a passive window to the internet but an active, intelligent layer that manages your work in the background. Users could “launch a set of comet help work” and then, as Srinivas puts it, spend their time on other things while the AI works. This transforms the nature of office work from a series of active inputs to a process of delegation and overview.
Release or massive move?
What happens to the human worker when their work functions are condensed into a single promise? Srinivas offers an optimistic view, suggesting that this new efficiency will release the time and attention of humanity. He believes that people will spend more time for leisure and personal enrichment, that they will “choose to spend it for entertainment more than intellectual work.” In his vision, AI makes the effort, and we get more time to “cool and scroll through X or what social resources they like.”
But this utopian point of view looks at the more immediate and painful economic question: What happens to the millions of people whose standard of living is built upon performing the very tasks that these agents are designed to automate? While some may be raised to the role of “AI orchestra”, many could face a move.
The AI agent, as described by one of its main architects, is not just a new function. It is a catalyst for a deep and possibly brutal transformation of the white -colored workforce. The future of work is written in code, and according to Srinivas, the first draft will be ready much earlier than most of us think.
