Perplexity AI CEO and founder Aravind Srinivas said Friday that startup Comet browsers can increase productivity, so businesses don’t need additional employees.
“Instead of hiring another person on your team, you can use comets to make up for all the work you’re doing,” Srinivas told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The CEO said that an artificial intelligence-powered web browser is a “true personal assistant” that allows users to complete more tasks in the same time, and that the productivity gained by one person is worth $10,000 a year.
According to Jan Hatzius, chief US economist at Goldman Sachs, AI is already deployed across the enterprise, making the impact of labor more efficient, but has been “limited” so far.
Srinivas estimates that the value of “human digital knowledge work” contributes about $25 trillion to gross domestic product, so a 20% increase in productivity could easily reach $5 trillion GDP growth.
Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Ghoolsby agreed with Srinivas that AI could benefit overall GDP if it could boost productivity growth and services, but warned of large-scale AI infrastructure spending.
“If AI growth is not as big as its biggest supporters think, we should think about what happens,” Goolsbee said on Friday, “telling Squawk Box,” CNBC. “Do we need to get over skiing a bit with overinvestment and clean up if there’s a bubble? We’d like to think about that topic.”
Data center demand is yet to show no indication of a halt as tech companies continue to step up their AI investments.
Mega cups like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and alphabet We are considering spending up to $320 billion on AI technology and data center expansion in 2025.
Perplexity first launched Comet to Perplexity Max users in July. This costs $200 a month and earns millions of people, the company said. The browser is now available for free download to everyone in the world on Thursday.
Comet can browse the internet to aid in research and perform multiple tasks asynchronously.
“It’s really about providing value and you can delegate tasks to it,” Srinivas said.
Other high-tech companies also deploy their own AI browser assistants.
In January, Openai released Gemini AI to the Chrome browser in September by web agent, operator, and Google.
