Nate B Jones reviews Perplexity's Comet agentic browser and argues it's the first AI agent that genuinely works
Nate B Jones of AI News & Strategy Daily gives a hands-on review of Comet, Perplexity's $200/month agentic browser.
Summary
Nate B Jones reviews Comet, the agentic browser from Perplexity, arguing it is the first general-purpose AI agent he has encountered that delivers real, measurable value in a working day. He contrasts Comet with competitors including OpenAI's Operator, Google's Project Mariner, Zapier, and n8n, arguing that most agents fail not because of weak AI but because of poor user interface design. His central claim is that Perplexity's key insight — that the assistant should do its work and disappear rather than demand constant supervision — is what separates Comet from everything else currently available. He walks through a live demonstration covering research, calendar management, LinkedIn, and Gmail tasks, and makes the case that at $200 a month, the tool justifies its cost if it saves ten or more hours per month.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The problem with AI agents — and why UI is the real issue
Nate B Jones: My inbox is littered with people pitching me AI agents. If I go online, I see nothing but AI agents. It's the year of the AI agent, and I have yet to find an AI agent that really made a difference in my workday — until today.
Comet is that AI agent. And the reason why is not AI, it's UI — it's user interface. I'm going to get into why that is and show off Comet a little bit. At the end of the day, Comet is an agent that works because the team at Perplexity has figured out that my goal is to actually let the assistant do the work and disappear. It is not to see everything the assistant does. It is not to get buried in the cost of building the assistant. And so many agents right now bury you in the cost of building the assistant or controlling it directly.
Comparing Comet to Zapier, n8n, and OpenAI's Operator
Let me give you a few examples. Zapier and n8n are very different generations — Zapier is a much older company, and n8n is much newer. Both of them lean you into building an agent. You have to define exactly what you want it to do. You have to invest really heavily in getting it to work right. n8n is soaring in popularity because it is better at that, and it does offer value — don't hear me wrong — but it is not a general-purpose agent. It's not close to a general-purpose agent. And if you try to build a general-purpose agent in n8n, you're probably going to be disappointed. It is useful for specific agentic tasks. If you want to do a specific job that involves extracting text from a document and putting it into a spreadsheet, for example, n8n will do fine at that. You can probably get Zapier to do fine at that. There are a lot of other agent startups that will do that too.
But Comet is different. Comet by Perplexity is really a general-purpose agent assistant. The closest comparison we've had previously has been Operator from OpenAI and Project Mariner, which most people don't know about, from Gemini.
I wanted to love Operator. I really did. The vision was great — ChatGPT on the web, the power of ChatGPT decision-making across the web. The execution and the UI were really, really bad. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It is awkward to have this tiny little browser that looks like a toy-sized browser inside a chat window. It's slow. I don't care what the actual clock time says on these agentic things — I think it starts the clock late or something, because I swear it takes longer than it says it takes. I've had instances where Operator says it took eight minutes and it was like 20 minutes of clock time.
So if you think about it, the vision for Operator was great, but what doomed it was the UI. It was the UI. And what Perplexity gets right is the UI. That's why Comet shines.
How Comet works in practice — calendar, LinkedIn, and daily tasks
Comet shines because the fundamental insight of the Perplexity team is that the assistant should disappear. It should just go do work for you. I was on a different website today — I was actually looking at Substack, because of course I was — and I thought, "I have a meeting I need to reschedule." So I just worked with Perplexity to get the meeting rescheduled. I talked to my Comet assistant and said, "Hey, this is the meeting, approximately here is where I want it moved. There's a block of meetings here — suggest a time." It went and found the meeting. It suggested a time. It actually gave me a recommendation for a better time within that block that would fit well with my goal of having clean working blocks. Then it drafted up a calendar change. I made a minor edit and approved it. And then it said, "Hey, just as a best practice, you should send an email to this person too." I said, "Okay, great." It drafted up the email, I made another minor tweak, approved it, and sent it — all from the sidebar while I was doing other things. I didn't have to go to Gmail. I didn't have to go to Google Calendar. It was super easy.
LinkedIn — I was able to go through and look at my pending LinkedIn invites sitting in the sidebar chatting with Comet. Super easy.
What I'm saying is that the idea that we have to see the agent is probably a legacy of the idea that the agent is untrustworthy. And if the agent can hook into data and it just works, we don't need to supervise it as closely — and we kind of don't want to. We want it to be fast and trustworthy and dependable. Comet gets this stuff done quickly. It gets it done really well.
I am a fan of Indonesian cuisine, and Comet found for me an Indonesian restaurant I had not run across in my neighborhood — well, not quite my neighborhood, two or three neighborhoods over, but still, it found something in a special interest of mine in my city that I wouldn't have been able to find otherwise. So I'm getting real value on day one, and it's been really easy.
The browser takeover UI — a genuinely good design decision
I also think that when Comet needs to interact with your browser and starts to take over, the way they've done that UI is really good. What Comet does is it actually goes to your main browser and glows it up blue — like you're looking through a Star Trek portal or something — and then it does something quickly in the browser and takes the blue away. It's a very intuitive way of saying, "Hey, Comet is driving now. You always have a chance to stop it." It's just really smoothly implemented.
Live demonstration — TikTok Shop, Amazon, and LinkedIn research
You're probably tired of hearing me talk about Comet, so let's very quickly show you Comet.
Okay, here we are. "TikTok Shop is slowing down" — I literally put that into the address bar here. It triggers a Perplexity search and it talks about the impact of how TikTok Shop is slowing down. I have a thesis I want to explore with the assistant, and we're just going to watch it work.
"I have a thesis that TikTok Shop slowing down affects social commerce more broadly and may impact Amazon's outlook. Please look at Amazon's recent public filings, etc. Get a sense of how the company is looking at social commerce."
And you can see it's just working away there. Now if I want to continue, I can also say: "Has TikTok experienced layoffs around TikTok Shop?" — because this is happening simultaneously.
So Amazon is pursuing an agnostic social commerce approach, explicitly in response to TikTok, with similar integrations with Instagram, Snap, Pinterest, and YouTube Shorts, and growing a bunch of other initiatives to keep up with creators. So I'm getting a sense of how Amazon is approaching this, and I really appreciate that this is actually a more coherent take than I typically see from AI at this point. It's not just bland. "Amazon is not ignoring TikTok Shop's slowdown — it's hedging risk and investing further." That seems to be supported by the comments up there. And it's more actionable and on point than I've typically seen.
And yes, this has affected TikTok Shop. So it seems like we have a TikTok Shop impact confirmed.
All right, let's do something fun. "Can you find the top profiles on LinkedIn for TikTok Shop-affiliated PMs and engineers who may have been affected by layoffs?" — and it's going to go and look at my LinkedIn.
What I'm trying to give you a sense of is how this can look across multiple things. It plugs into LinkedIn. It plugs into your calendar. It plugs into your Gmail. You can do multiple things at once. This is going to keep running even if I change where I'm going in the address bar. And then it starts to find them. I'm not going to click on their links — I don't want to violate their privacy — but it gives me both a way to approach it and some example profiles. Overall, it's pretty good.
So there you go. That's Comet.
Is Comet worth $200 a month? A new way of valuing software
I have been really pleased with it. I think Comet is the first agentic browser that actually lives up to the name. And I think whether it's worth $200 a month essentially requires you to add up those five, eight, ten, fifteen-minute increments it's going to be saving you, be disciplined about it, measure the value of your time, and ask: is this worth $200 a month in time savings to me?
That's a new way of valuing software. But I think that's where we're at with cognitive intelligence baked into software at this point. It gives us a new valuation paradigm for software that I'm still getting used to myself. I'm not used to paying $200 a month for any kind of software, let alone for a browser. Old Nate is crying. But it makes sense when you think about the time savings. If this thing saves me ten to fifteen hours a month, it's obviously worth the $200. And if you add up all those ten to fifteen-minute increments saved through the day, I can see the case for ten hours a month in savings — and that would make it worth it.
So my challenge to you, if you want to start exploring good agents, is to impose the kinds of tests you would actually use them for. Be really rigorously honest about whether they work or not. I put Comet through eight different workflow tests this morning just to see how good it is before making this video. I was not easily impressed. I wanted to examine it, and I wanted to examine it versus Operator, because Operator is a tool I know pretty well and have been frankly disappointed in.
If you want to try Comet, I would suggest signing up for just a month and putting it through workflow tests in your own environment with the tools you use, and see if you get value — and measure the value. Measure the time savings. If you're going to make an investment like this, make sure you make it worth it. Because if it is worth it, if it saves you more than $200 a month, it's going to be probably a multiple of that. If it's saving you ten hours and you value your time at $35 an hour, you're getting close to 2x ROI every single month. If you value your time more highly, you get more. If you save more time, you get more. You see where the math goes.
And that doesn't count it helping you make better decisions. Because it can look at the browser natively, it can help you make better decisions in a way that screenshotting doesn't really do. There's something native about the collaboration between the assistant and the browser that you can't get anywhere else cleanly. And I think that's another piece of value that Perplexity is positioned to capture.
The bigger picture — Comet as an AI operating system play
Now, the key for Perplexity is that they are making an OS. This is where all of these AI players are going. We live on the web so much that if you become the browser — the dominant browser of choice — you become the OS for AI. And that's where they're going.
Time will tell if this actually pays off. If Google launches Mariner more aggressively — because Google obviously has a stake in the ground with Chrome — maybe OpenAI is going to lean away from voice a little bit and lean further into Operator. Who knows? One thing we know about AI is that it's going to change frequently.
But for now, what I know is that I actually saw a general-purpose agent that worked today. And I'm still amazed. I never expected to see a general-purpose agent that was this fast, this efficient, this effective across a wide range of tasks — flight reservations, restaurants, LinkedIn tasks, Gmail tasks, calendar tasks, looking across multiple different sources to accomplish workflows. It's doing a lot. And I can see that the team has built a data structure that's going to enable them to do even more.
To me, this feels ahead of schedule. Yes, I knew agents were coming. Yes, I knew general-purpose agents were coming. But this fast and this connected feels three or four months early. So it's great to see it. And we'll see where the Perplexity Comet team takes us next.