Money 20/20 USA: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on why AI should be the CFO of your life

Everyone's the CEO of their own life. Perplexity is their CFO.

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It's been a big shift in terms of people perceiving these as tools to more of an operating system for work. So a lot of Perplexity used one year ago for the finance vertical was looking up stocks, doing some research on like what's happening in the world, getting news related to stocks, asking questions about where to invest in. But now you can connect your portfolio through a connector inside this agent product we have called Comet, and actually turn it into a recurring automations platform.

Starting from simple things like track my daily spend and track all my budget and like keep me under control, to actually helping you construct your portfolio, building your own personal Bloomberg terminal, helping you understand how to build towards a certain investment strategy, and you're still in control. You're not giving the agent full control of like making all these trades on your behalf or making purchases on your behalf. You're still doing that, but you're using a really world-class, accurate, agentic operating system to make all your decisions. And we've seen that like one-third of all this usage on these kind of use cases are just recurring automation. So that is the biggest paradigm shift from reactive questions to background tasks and processes that keep running your personal finance. So everyone's the CEO of their own life. Perplexity is their CFO.

I actually think we can do that. But contrary to what a lot of people think, people are not interested in letting AIs purchase on their behalf. People want AIs to help them decide what to purchase. It's the research and analysis part that is actually like where AI is adding real value, and that's what people come to our products for. Actually making the purchase has been one click for two decades. It's pretty easy once you know exactly what flight you want. Once you know exactly what item you want to purchase, it's not that hard to actually click and purchase. In fact, doing it through an agent is a waste of time. But using AI to actually like do the research for you, study a thousand websites, look through all the reviews, identify what like the product is really doing compared to what it claims, personalizing to your preferences, what the AI understands about you, and giving you like a clear set of suggestions is all about accuracy and search. That's really our like specialty. We've consistently ranked the best on deep research benchmarks, finance benchmarks, like all these benchmarks that care about hallucination rates being low, auditability trail for how the AI came to the decision in terms of where it picked the information from, the citations, observability of like the agent traces. That's where like people build trust and make decisions worth like starting from a few hundreds of dollars all the way to hundreds of millions of dollars, that whole spectrum. We want to like be the best AI there. Letting people actually do the purchases has been super easy. Like you can book a flight in one click or two clicks right now on United App. So that's not that difficult. The trust layer is a big part about that.