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 complete skilled roles.

“A recruiter’s work value 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 fashionable data 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 complicated, multi-step duties from begin to end. In accordance with Srinivas, probably the most pure place for this revolution to start is the one instrument each workplace employee already makes use of: the net browser. And the primary jobs in its sights are these of recruiters and govt assistants.

The Automation of Experience

For years, the promise of AI has been to help, not change. However the imaginative and prescient Srinivas lays out is one among 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 could be tasked to discover a record of all engineers who studied at Stanford and beforehand labored at Anthropic, port that record to a Google Sheet with their LinkedIn URLs, discover their contact info, after which “bulk draft personalised chilly emails to every of them to succeed in out to for a espresso chat.”

The identical logic applies to the work of an govt assistant. By having safe, client-side entry to a consumer’s logged-in functions 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 comply with up with these candidates, sync with my Google calendar, after which resolve conflicts and schedule a chat, after which push me a quick forward of the assembly.”

This can be a elementary 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’t execute these most complicated, “long-horizon” duties completely right this moment, Srinivas is betting that the ultimate limitations are about to fall. He’s pinning his timeline on the upcoming arrival of the following era 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 must be a wake-up name for anybody in these professions. “I’m fairly certain six months to a 12 months from now, it could actually do your entire factor,” he predicts. This implies that the disruption isn’t a far-off summary idea however an impending actuality that would reshape complete departments earlier than the top 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 instrument 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 working on a regular basis,” he says.

On this new paradigm, the browser is now not a passive window to the web however an energetic, clever layer that manages your work within the background. Customers might “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 technique 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 liberate humanity’s time and a focus. 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 way of X or no matter social media they like.”

However this utopian view sidesteps the extra speedy and painful financial query: What occurs to the tens of millions 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 might face displacement.

The AI agent, as described by one among its chief architects, shouldn’t be 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 keeping with Srinivas, the primary draft will probably be prepared far earlier than most of us suppose.