My Assistant Is Now a Web Browser 💻🕸️

Earlier this year, when I started research for this AI-takeover book, I hired a reporting assistant. She was great—a hard-working, recent college grad looking to make some money outside her full-time gig. Her main jobs for me were:

• Create research documents on specific AI categories (Healthcare, robotics, etc.) 

• Pull information about companies doing interesting things in some of those AI categories. 

• Find contact info for companies and experts. Then reach out to them for me.

Over the past year, AI has not-so quietly taken over most of those tasks—especially the first two—with deep research tools now baked into nearly every major chatbot. But now, with Perplexity’s Comet browser, I’ve officially replaced most of her core responsibilities with AI.

Comet Browser 

Comet has a built‑in AI assistant living in a sidebar that can search the web, summarize pages, and pull info you need without ever opening a new tab. It even hooks into your accounts—like Gmail—so it can draft and send messages for you.

For example, this week I wanted to find people who had been laid off from customer service jobs because of AI. I told the Comet assistant to find LinkedIn posts from people talking about it and then draft a note to them for me. In less than a minute, it scanned posts and comments, pulled a few names and links, and started drafting outreach messages. They were right there in the sidebar—ready for me to review.

I could even open the LinkedIn pages, turn on the screenshot feature and tell it to send the messages on its own. You can then watch the assistant click around and do that. Obviously, I wanted to edit and approve all the messages before sending them.

Same thing when I needed to find an email address for a source: Comet found three possibilities, drafted an intro emails, and since it’s integrated with Gmail, I hit send without leaving the interface.

It can even navigate around a website for you while you do something else in another tab. On United.com, I told it to find me the cheapest flight to Chicago the week of August 18. While I was off writing this newsletter in another tab, it found the flight and even started filling out my personal details (name, email, gender) like a very polite, slightly over‑eager travel agent.

ChatGPT Agent Mode  

I tried similar tasks with OpenAI’s new Agent Mode. It found pretty similar LinkedIn leads and email addresses, but because it runs in a virtual browser inside ChatGPT, you can’t do much that requires your own accounts. And no, I’m not logging into my personal accounts in OpenAI’s virtual sandbox. 

Comet, to be clear, has its own set of privacy issues. You can adjust some controls in the Settings. The CEO of Perplexity Aravind Srinivas addressed some of the privacy protections and tradeoffs in this Reddit AMA as well.

OpenAI is reportedly working on its own browser, and seeing how good Comet is, it makes total sense. Microsoft, meanwhile, is working overtime to jam more Copilot into Edge. The future of interacting with AI tools is clearly headed into the browser. 

The web isn’t dead—it’s just going to be full of AI agents clicking around for us, which is a problem for a whole other set of privacy and security reasons.  

The downside? Comet is only available right now to Perplexity Max subscribers. Yes, that’s the $200‑a‑month plan. Otherwise, you’ve got to join the waitlist—alongside over a million other people, according to the company. A spokesperson told me they’re sending out 10,000 to 50,000 invites a day, and $20‑a‑month Pro users should get access “soon.” Maybe in the next two weeks.

I haven’t fully abandoned Microsoft Edge, my main browser on my Mac. (Yes, I know, I’m confessing this every week.) But Comet has now become essential to finishing the research for this book.