AI Will Substitute Recruiters and Assistants in Six Months, Says CEO Behind ChatGPT Rival

Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of the formidable 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 whole skilled roles.

“A recruiter’s work price one week is only one immediate: sourcing and attain outs,” Srinivas said 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 information 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 keeping with Srinivas, probably the most pure place for this revolution to start is the one device each workplace employee already makes use of: the net 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 in every of alternative 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 might be tasked to discover a checklist of all engineers who studied at Stanford and beforehand labored at Anthropic, port that checklist 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 consumer’s logged-in purposes like Gmail and Google Calendar, the agent can take over the tedious back-and-forth of scheduling. “If some individuals reply,” Srinivas explains, the agent can “go and replace the Google Sheets, mark the standing as responded or in progress and observe 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.”

It is a basic re-imagining of productiveness, the place the human position 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 the moment, Srinivas is betting that the ultimate limitations are about to fall. He’s pinning his timeline on the upcoming arrival of the subsequent 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 ought to be a wake-up name for anybody in these professions. “I’m fairly positive six months to a 12 months from now, it may well do the whole factor,” he predicts. This means that the disruption isn’t a far-off summary idea however an impending actuality that would reshape whole departments earlier than the tip of subsequent 12 months.

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 device evolves into one thing way more integral to our digital lives.

“That’s the extent to which now we have 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 energetic, 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 collection of energetic inputs to a means 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 provides an optimistic view, suggesting that this newfound effectivity will unencumber humanity’s time and a spotlight. He believes individuals will spend extra time on leisure and private enrichment, that they may “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 by means of 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 position of “AI orchestrator,” many may face displacement.

The AI agent, as described by one in every of its chief architects, just isn’t merely a brand new characteristic. It’s a catalyst for a profound and doubtlessly brutal transformation of the white-collar workforce. The way forward for work is being written in code, and in response to Srinivas, the primary draft can be prepared far before most of us suppose.