How AI browsers like Perplexity Comet will reshape the internet—and the media

I’ve been using Comet, Perplexity’s AI-powered browser, for the past week. Using it to navigate the internet is very similar to any other browser experience, with one major enhancement: the Comet Assistant. It’s a feature that can accomplish web-based tasks independent of you, and I’m quickly becoming convinced it’s the future.

I wrote an extensive review of Comet for The Media Copilot newsletter, but here I’d like to explore the broader implications—not just stemming from Comet, but the whole idea of an AI-powered web browser, because soon we’ll be swimming in them. OpenAI is reportedly about to release its own take on the idea, and certainly Chrome won’t be far behind given Google’s deep push into AI.

Introducing a browsing assistant isn’t just a convenience. It has the potential to fundamentally redefine our relationship with the web. AI browsers like Comet represent the first wave in a sea change, shifting the internet from something we actively navigate to something we delegate tasks to, increasingly trusting AI to act on our behalf. That will present new challenges around privacy and ethics, but also create more opportunities, especially for the media.

A new browser dawns

Those old enough to remember web browsers when they didn’t have cookies (which let websites remember you were logged in) or omniboxes (which hard-wired search into the experience) understand how significant those changes were. After using Comet, I would argue the addition of an AI companion transcends them all. For the first time you’re surfing the web with a partner. The Comet Assistant is like having your own personal intern for what you’re doing online, ready to take on any menial or low-priority tasks so you don’t have to.

For example, I order most of my groceries online every week. Rather than spinning up a list myself, I only need to open a tab, navigate the store site, and tell Comet to do it. I can command it to look at past orders and my standing shopping list as a guide, give it a rough idea of the meals I want to make, and it’ll fill up the cart on its own. Or I could tell it to find the nearest Apple Store with open Genius Bar appointments on Saturday morning, and book a repair for a broken iPhone screen.

You get the idea. Once you start using Comet like this, it becomes kind of addictive as you search for its limits. Book a flight? Plan a vacation? Clean up my RSS reader (it really needs it)? To be clear, the execution often isn’t perfect, so you still need to check its work before taking that final step—in fact, with most use cases, it’ll require this even if the command is quite clear (e.g. “Buy it”), which should give most people some relief to their apprehension of outsourcing things they’d previously done by hand.

But I believe this outsourcing is inevitable. In practice, Comet functions as an agent, and while its abilities are still nascent, they’re already useful enough to benefit a large number of people. Browser assistants will likely be most people’s first experience with agents, and most will judge them for how effectively they perform tasks with minimal guidance.

That will depend not just on the quality of the tool and the AI models powering it, but also how much it knows about the user. Privacy concerns are elevated with agents: think about the grocery example and now extrapolate that to medical or financial information. Can I trust my AI provider to safeguard that information from marketers, hackers, and other users of the same AI? Perplexity has the distinction of not training foundation models, so at least the concern about leaks into training data is moot. But the level of access a browser agent has—essentially looking over your shoulder at everything you do online—creates a very large target.

Nonetheless, the potential for convenience is so great that I believe many people will use them anyway, and not see the leap to agents as much more than the access they already give major tech platform providers like Apple or Google.

Providing informational fuel for agents

This has big implications for the media. If you think about the things we do online—shopping, banking, interacting with healthcare providers—all of them are informed by context, often in the form of research that we do ourselves. We’re already offloading some of that to AI, but the introduction of a personal browser agent means that can happen even closer to the task. So if I ask the AI to fill my shopping cart with low-fat ingredients for chicken enchiladas, it’s going to need to get that information from somewhere.

This opens up a new landscape to information providers: the contextual searches needed to support agent activity. Whereas humans can only find, read, and process so much data to get the best information for what they’re doing, AI theoretically has no limits. In other words, the surface area of AI searches will expand massively, and so will the competition for it. The field of “AIEO,” the AI version of SEO, is about to get very hot.

The spike in agent activity will also hopefully lead to better standards of how bots identify themselves. As I wrote about recently, AI companies have essentially given themselves permission to ignore bot restrictions on sites when those bots are behaving on behalf of users (as opposed to training or search indexing). That’s a major area of concern for content creators who want to control how AI ingests and adapts their content, and if bot activity suddenly becomes much bigger, so does the issue.

Information workers, and journalists in particular, will be able to unlock a lot of potential with browser agents. Think about how many of the software platforms you use professionally are browser-based. In a typical newsroom, reporters and editors will use information and context across all kinds of systems—from a communications platform like Slack to project-management software like Asana to a CMS like WordPress. Automations can ease some of the tedium, but many newsrooms don’t have enough resources for the technical upkeep.

With a browser agent, workers can automate their own tasks on the fly. Certainly, the data privacy concerns are even higher in a professional environment, but so are the rewards. An AI informed by not just internet data and the context of your task, but with the goals and knowledge base of your workplace—AND with mastery over your browser-based software—would effectively give everyone on the team their own assistant.

And this isn’t some distant, hypothetical scenario—you can do it right now. Comet is here, and though the Assistant sometimes stumbles through tasks like a newborn calf, it has the ability to perform research, operate software, and accomplish tasks on behalf of the user. That rewrites the rules of online interaction. While the amplified privacy concerns demand clearer boundaries and stricter accountability, AI browsers represent a step change in how we use the internet: We’re no longer alone out there.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91370139/ai-browsers-perplexity-comet-reshape-internet-media?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss