Young people must cut down on time spent on social media and focus instead on learning artificial intelligence (AI) tools if they wish to remain competitive in the job market, said Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas in a recent conversation with tech YouTuber Matthew Berman.
"Spend less time doomscrolling on Instagram; spend more time using the AIs," Srinivas advised, warning that those who fail to adapt to rapid technological changes risk being left behind. “People who really are at the frontier of using AIs [systems] are going to be way more employable than people who are not. That's guaranteed to happen,” he added.
He stressed that fluency in AI tools is quickly becoming a key determinant of employability. The ability to work effectively with advanced systems, he argued, will set apart the workforce of tomorrow. “That’s just where the world is going,” said Srinivas.
However, he acknowledged that this accelerated pace of change presents a significant challenge. With new AI tools evolving every three to six months, workers are under growing pressure to continuously reskill.
"The human race has never been extremely fast at adapting," he observed. “This is testing the limits in terms of how fast we can adapt.”
Srinivas also noted that while automation may displace some jobs, it also opens up pathways for entrepreneurship and innovation. “Either the other people who lose jobs end up starting companies themselves and make use of AIs, or they end up learning the AIs and contribute to new companies,” he explained.
His views echo warnings from other AI experts. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has previously predicted that up to 50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated within five years due to automation. Geoffrey Hinton, often described as the ‘Godfather of AI’, has also warned that artificial intelligence may soon replace humans in many forms of “mundane intellectual labour.”
Others, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, have offered a more optimistic outlook, suggesting that AI will augment rather than entirely replace human roles, transforming jobs rather than eliminating them altogether.
Srinivas believes that tools like Perplexity’s Comet could soon replace recruiters altogether. Speaking on The Verge’s ‘Decoder’ podcast, he explained: “A recruiter’s work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs. And then you’ve got to do state tracking.”
He went on to detail what the ideal AI assistant could handle: “You want it to keep following up, keep a track of their responses... update the Google Sheets, mark the status as responded or in progress... sync with my Google Calendar... schedule a chat, and then push me a brief ahead of the meeting. Some of these things should be proactive. It doesn’t even have to be a prompt.”
Currently, access to Comet remains limited to paid users, although Perplexity has started rolling out invitations to free users.
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