Aravind Srinivas
Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, the AI answer engine company that has expanded into autonomous agents, research and knowledge-work tools.
“I feel like consumer is kind of building the yellow pages equivalent in AI. Google AI Overview or AI Mode is that. On the other hand, being extremely good at deep research, knowledge work, automations, coding allows you to make a lot of money.”
Newcomer Pod · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Asked where consumer AI goes if the big labs make most of their money from agents and business customers, Srinivas compares consumer AI search to the Yellow Pages.
Transcript
…pioneered this. OpenAI is pivoting to this, and they've been doing really well with Codex as well. But that took them a while to realize, and they had all this advantage they accumulated with consumer mindshare with ChatGPT that may not necessarily be useful for getting people to pay for tokens.
…world go these days? I mean, if you have the biggest labs realizing that 90% of their revenue is going to come from or whatever your split was, what's the future of consumer look like? Is it even relevant, or does Google just kind of suck up what interest there is and that's kind of where it goes?
Well, I feel like consumers is like kind of building the yellow pages equivalent in AI. Like Google AI overview or AI mode is that. And obviously some people are joking, okay, you put it's like the Google shipping perplexity on the Google search bar. Yes, but it may not help you make money. In fact, like the latest earnings law showed that it actually loses money for them. On the other hand, being extremely good at deep research, knowledge work, automations, coding allows you to make a lot of money. There was this Twitter user, I think his name is Signal. Some people might know him.
SIGNGING. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He actually wrote a very good
tweet once saying in consumer products, retention is actually sought after. You don't want a product with low retention.
Right.
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