AI might handle simple sales, but complex deals like government contracts still need humans. The real bottleneck: AI has to earn more trust than a person does. Perplexity and other AI-first companies are betting trust is the scarce asset of the future.
Of course they like want to maximize the amount of revenue that the company generates and ultimately their commission. So I think like, you know, that is maybe some proof of models and AI replacing salespeople, especially at the sort of like transactional or almost commodity style sales. You know, other end of the spectrum you have the, I don't know, andurils of the world that are selling weapons to the government. Probably need a human for that for the foreseeable future and then everything in between. The second thing that comes to mind.
Is just building on that. I think the most essential quality for AI products and AI first products as you project out is what you were referring to, which I call trust. Right. And you really have to trust a salesperson to have confidence they're not selling you something you don't need. But the trust threshold for an AI is even greater and you know that that informs everything we do at Perplexity. How do we create and preserve trust with our users? And trust will be the scarce asset of the agentic Internet. And a lot of the products are built on top of it. So you know, it's easy to create AIs that manipulate people, but that's a very short term strategy. And for folks that want to build for the long term, you have to build trust in at the foundation level of your product and how you prompt these different AIs.
Yeah.
