By The Indian Express
Publication Date: 2025-12-10 14:26:00
AI agents, generative AI systems that act autonomously to perform tasks, have repeatedly been promoted by tech companies as a ‘digital concierge’ capable of making purchases, booking travel, or scheduling meetings on behalf of the user, without requiring their constant input.
But new data suggests that this vision is in contrast to how people are actually using AI agents.
While these agents are good at booking hotels or handling rote chores, over 57 per cent of all agent activity in Perplexity’s Comet browser was focused on cognitive work, according to a new study released by Harvard University researchers in partnership with the AI search startup on Tuesday, December 9.
The study, which researchers claimed was the first large-scale effort to understand how people are using AI agents, found that 36 per cent of the most common actions carried out by Perplexity’s AI browser agent were productivity and workflow tasks, while 21 per cent of the tasks had to do with learning and research.
These findings are based on the researchers’ analysis of hundreds of millions of anonymised interactions from Comet and Comet Assistant users. It was focused on three fundamental questions: Who is adopting AI agents? How intensively are they using them? And what tasks are they delegating to their AI assistants?
Notably, productivity and workflow-related tasks also had the highest retention rates. By using AI agents for learning or research tasks early on, people are also much more…
