The Adoption and Usage of AI Agents: Early Evidence from Perplexity
Jeremy Yang, Noah Yonack, Kate Zyskowski, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, Jerry Ma
TL;DR
This study provides the first large-scale field evidence on how general-purpose AI agents are adopted and used in open-world web environments, using millions of Comet interactions. It introduces a hierarchical agentic taxonomy to classify use cases across topics, subtopics, and tasks, and validates this taxonomy against a golden dataset. Findings show substantial heterogeneity in adoption across cohorts, countries, and occupations, with productivity and learning as the dominant use cases and a notable shift toward cognitively oriented tasks over time. The work offers practical guidance for researchers, businesses, and educators while outlining limitations and avenues for future research, including cross-platform diffusion and evaluating economic value from agent use.
Abstract
This paper presents the first large-scale field study of the adoption, usage intensity, and use cases of general-purpose AI agents operating in open-world web environments. Our analysis centers on Comet, an AI-powered browser developed by Perplexity, and its integrated agent, Comet Assistant. Drawing on hundreds of millions of anonymized user interactions, we address three fundamental questions: Who is using AI agents? How intensively are they using them? And what are they using them for? Our findings reveal substantial heterogeneity in adoption and usage across user segments. Earlier adopters, users in countries with higher GDP per capita and educational attainment, and individuals working in digital or knowledge-intensive sectors -- such as digital technology, academia, finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship -- are more likely to adopt or actively use the agent. To systematically characterize the substance of agent usage, we introduce a hierarchical agentic taxonomy that organizes use cases across three levels: topic, subtopic, and task. The two largest topics, Productivity & Workflow and Learning & Research, account for 57% of all agentic queries, while the two largest subtopics, Courses and Shopping for Goods, make up 22%. The top 10 out of 90 tasks represent 55% of queries. Personal use constitutes 55% of queries, while professional and educational contexts comprise 30% and 16%, respectively. In the short term, use cases exhibit strong stickiness, but over time users tend to shift toward more cognitively oriented topics. The diffusion of increasingly capable AI agents carries important implications for researchers, businesses, policymakers, and educators, inviting new lines of inquiry into this rapidly emerging class of AI capabilities.