What Problems Do AI Browsers Solve?

It’s a tough question. They are slower, there are privacy concerns, and as if that weren’t enough, you are also exposed to the risk of serious security vulnerabilities through prompt injection, as malicious websites can hide instructions in text or images to hijack the AI. There’s nothing you can do with AI browsers, or do more conveniently, that isn’t already possible right now in a browser window with an AI chat. A frequently cited example is that AI browsers are capable of performing actions such as planning and booking a vacation trip, but does anyone actually want that?

Therefore, the question: What actual problem are companies like OpenAI (with ChatGPT Atlas) or Perplexity (with the Comet browser) trying to solve?

If such AI browsers do not solve any problems for users, why are they being developed and offered?

Perhaps we can find some insight into this in an interview from April 23, 2025, in which Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, spoke on TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network, a daily livestream) about the motivations for developing their own browser.

Super Personalized and Hyper Optimized Ads Require Deep User Profiling

“I believe like you can do a lot of interesting things with memory where once you understand the user deeply enough the user can probably trust you if you show them relevant sponsored content as long as it’s super personalized and hyper optimized for that user. Instagram has shown some stats where the engagement time on their platform reduces if you do remove the ads because that’s the level of personalization of the ads. So if any of the AI companies can do that, I think that could be like a thing where brands could pay a lot more money to advertise there. So that’s yet to be explored. But in order to crack that you need to crack memory properly. That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser. It’s like we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you. Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work related. It’s not like that personal. On the other hand like: What are things you’re buying? Which hotels are you going to? Where are you? Which restaurants are you going to? What are you spending time browsing? tells us so much more about you that we plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and maybe you know through our discover feed we could show some ads there.”

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, TBPN interview, April 23, 2025, Watch on YouTube at 42:41 (Transcript generated with OpenAI Whisper.)

Can It Succeed?

AI vendors promote their browsers not because they are better for users, but because they are better suited for selling expensive ads. Of course, it’s obvious that brands would spend heavily to target people who are highly interested in buying their type of products. However, if users do not benefit from using such browsers, but on the contrary even experience disadvantages, I wonder why they should choose to use them at all.

Time will tell whether this approach succeeds or fades into oblivion.