Perplexity AI Challenges Tech Giants with Innovative Approach to AI Assistants

Perplexity's CEO Sees AI Agents as the Next Web Battleground

Perplexity has tapped into the power of generative artificial intelligence -- with all its problematic tendencies -- in an effort to challenge Google as the dominant way people find information online. The AI search tool rose in prominence in 2024 and was lauded as a promising alternative to Googling. Like other AI players though, the service has been sued for alleged copyright infringement. It has been accused by Forbes of plagiarizing its news articles, closely paraphrasing other websites, and hallucinating incorrect information. Despite the furor, Perplexity today says that its service gets 650 million queries per month and is said to be chasing investment that would value the company at $18 billion. The company is pushing AI assistants for mobile devices and working on its own web browser. In April, Motorola announced that Perplexity would come bundled with its new Razr Ultra phones. Last month the company partnered with PayPal to make it easier for users to buy products using its assistant. Samsung is also said to be in talks to possibly include Perplexity on its devices, according to a report from Bloomberg. (Perplexity declined to comment on this after the interview.). Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas spoke with Will Knight, senior writer at WIRED, by phone and email. This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity. WIRED: The PayPal deal seems important to the vision that everyone has for agents. Is ecommerce the killer "agentic" app? Aravind Srinivas: Agents are the killer app for everything. Agents allow users to have the experience that's best for them. Some people like shopping and researching, and some people want it done for them. There's a spectrum in between, and our focus is what is the best experience for the user. Speaking of the experience, agents still make mistakes. What happens when they buy something by accident? Merchants and buyers have adapted to every new technology since ancient times. We just show both of them what is possible, and they choose. Every successful technology has had to take security and error-resolution very seriously, and that won't change. Integrating AI with personal devices is another big theme. Why does the Motorola deal matter to you? It's a big deal because Motorola is one of the largest phone brands in the world. This partnership gives us the ability to make trustworthy AI more accessible than ever. Now, by introducing Perplexity to millions of people around the world, in a native and seamless way, more people will get to see how much more really is possible with search. Would you consider developing your own devices eventually? We are focused on building the best AI assistant and answer engine. Motorola will offer other AI assistants, so how will Perplexity distinguish itself? As AI assistants become more common, accuracy and trust will become even more important. An assistant isn't very useful if it's unreliable. Worse, if an assistant is misleading or sycophantic, then it isn't an assistant -- it's a manipulator. That's not just useless, it's dangerous. Inaccurate AI has a negative compounding effect, and we have always been the leader in developing AI and AI assistants focused on accuracy and verifiability. That will have a positive compounding effect.

Perplexity AI Gains Traction by Understanding Business Needs | PYMNTS.com

Perplexity AI, once a scrappy startup in the shadow of OpenAI and Google, is gaining traction in the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) race. With a string of deals spanning Samsung, PayPal, SoftBank and others, as well as reported talks with Apple, the company is aggressively expanding its footprint across both enterprise and consumer markets. Its most recent partnerships include the following: PYMNTS Intelligence data shows that companies are stepping up their investments in AI, with 90% of CFOs report seeing "very positive" ROI in December 2024, triple the number of respondents who said the same nine months earlier. They are using GenAI to enhance productivity rather than to replace human workers entirely. Perplexity's strategic alliances position the AI startup for growth despite not enjoying the household name recognition of Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, nor the cachet of the Google and Microsoft brand names. When the White House under both Biden and Trump invited the who's who in AI, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas was not among them. Read more: The CAIO Report: Since March, Triple the CFOs Report Very Positive ROI From GenAI So why are large enterprises inking deals with Perplexity? "Perplexity has shown that being a model 'polyglot' can create more strategic advantages than owning the best single model," said Dev Nag, founder and CEO of QueryPal, who had worked at Google and PayPal. Unlike ChatGPT and other larger AI rivals, Perplexity's chatbot doesn't just use its own large language model (LLM) to generate answers. It can also switch to ChatGPT, Claude or its own Sonar model. Depending on what the user needs, Perplexity brings up the right LLM for the task. That means it's user-focused. "While everyone fixates on who builds the smartest AI, Perplexity discovered that aggregating multiple LLMs and letting users hop between GPT-4, Claude 3.5, and their own Sonar model delivers better economics and resilience," Nag explained to PYMNTS. For example, when OpenAI raises API prices or has an outage, Perplexity routes the traffic to another LLM. "This approach lets a 150-person startup handle 400 million queries monthly without the crushing compute costs that would bankrupt most teams trying to run frontier models end-to-end," Nag said. That's why enterprises like Perplexity. "The enterprise partnerships stem from this technical flexibility combined with something OpenAI initially missed: Citations and transparency actually matter more to institutional buyers than raw but untraceable intelligence," Nag said. Perplexity understands business needs. "Perplexity's enterprise savvy comes from understanding that B2B adoption follows completely different rules than consumer viral growth," Nag said. "While ChatGPT conquered hearts and minds through pure capability, enterprises needed the boring stuff first: SOC-2 compliance, data residency guarantees, and audit trails." Read more: Perplexity Adds PayPal as Checkout Option Darren Kimura, president and CEO of AI Squared, told PYMNTS that Perplexity and OpenAI's ChatGPT represent two very different approaches to the evolving AI landscape. "Perplexity positions itself as a real-time answer engine to provide concise, cited responses. This emphasis on provenance can appeal to users who are seeking verifiable information, such as researchers and executives," Kimura said. In contrast, ChatGPT serves as a general-purpose AI assistant, excelling in long-form reasoning, creative tasks and brainstorming, with its strength in its retention and contextual understanding, Kimura said. Due to these different approaches, they appeal to different audiences. Meanwhile, Perplexity is still dwarfed by OpenAI. ChatGPT saw 4.5 billion web visits in April 2025, compared to Perplexity's 125.4 million, according statistics from Semrush provided to PYMNTS. DeepSeek came in second, with 419 million visits, and Google's Gemini third, at 133 million. But Perplexity doesn't need to be the biggest player to win. It's positioning itself as a research-focused alternative to general-purpose assistants, with a business model built around transparency, multimodel agility and actionability. "Perplexity's bet is that fact-checking transparency and agentic capabilities can capture enough high-value queries to build a sustainable business, even without toppling the giants," Nag said.