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 Bestly Bestly Baccoming 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 Browader Implications-Not just steamming from comt, but the whole idea of an ai-powered weight, beach Soon we’ll be swimming in them. Openai is reportedly about to release its pay

Introducing a browsing assistant isn’t just a convenience. It has the potential to fundaefine our relationship with the web. AI Browsers Like ComeT REPRESET The first wave in a sea change, shifting the internet from somenting we actively navigate to sometising we delegate tasks to, Increasingly TRUSTING A to Act on OR. That will present new challenges Around Privacy and Ethics, but also also create more Oportunities, Especially for the Media.

A new browser dawns

Thos old enough to remumber web browsers when they didn Bollywood have cookies (which let websites remumber you were logged in) or omniboxes (which hard-wired search into the experience) Significant those changes were. After using comet, I would argue the addition of an ai company transcends them all. For the first time you’re surfing the web with a partner. The comt assistant is like having your own personal intern for what you 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 comt 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 fall up the Cart on its. 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 com 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 Bollywood, 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 (Eg “Buy IT”), which should give most people some relieve relieve to their apprehension of outsourcing things they’d previous done by hand.

But I believe this outsourcing is Inevitable. In Practice, COMET Functions as an agent, and while its abilitys are still nascent, they’re already useful enough enough to benefits a large number of people. Browser Assistants will luckly be most people’s first experience with agents, and most will judge it for how effectively they perform tasks with minimal gudance.

That will be not just 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 –ssanally looking over your Shoulder at Everything You Do Online – Creates a very large target.

Nonetheless, the potential for convenience is so great 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, interaction with healthcare providers – ball of them are informed by context, often in the form of research We’re alredy offloading some of that to ai, but the introduction of a personal browser agent means that 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 provides: 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 sits when there are there behaving on behaving on behaving on behaving 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 within become badge, so dog the is

Information Workers, and Journalists in Particular, will be able to unlock a lot of potential with browser agents. Think About How many Platforms You Use Professional Are Are Browser-Based. In a typical newsroom, reporters and editors will use information and context across all kinds of systems-form a communication platform like Slack to Project-MANAGENGEMENT SOTWARE LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE WordPress. Automations can ease some of the tedium, but many newsrooms given 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 just internet data and the context of your task, but with the goals and knowledge base of your workplace –nd with mastery over your browser-bosed software –willed Everyone on the team their own assistant.

And this isn’t some distant, hypothetical Scenario – Iou can do it right now. COMET is here, and thought the assistant someimes stumbles through tasks like a newborn calf, it has the ability to perform research, operate software, and ACCOMPLISH TASKS on the use. That rewrites the rules of online interaction. While the amplified privacy concerns Demand Clearer Boundaries and Stricter Accountability, AI Browsers REPRESERS A Step Change in How We Use The Internet: We’re No Longer Alone Out is there.