Can’t Keep Up With the AI Browser Wars? Here’s What Businesses Need to Know

In the nearly three years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, artificial intelligence has become a daily fact of life. Millions of people pay monthly subscriptions for access to AI assistants, social media is flooded with AI-generated content, and CEOs are telling their employees to start using AI or start looking for a new job. For the largest AI companies, this disruption is just the beginning of their plans to radically transform the internet. The next phase begins now.

By and large, people have been using AI to learn stuff. But now, artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Perplexity are unleashing more capable AI tools that can go beyond knowledge work and actually accomplish digital tasks for you.

In the past few weeks, we’ve gotten early looks at two differing visions for the future of the internet in an AI-powered world. On one end is OpenAI, which this week released ChatGPT agent, a new feature that enables ChatGPT to operate its own virtual computer (and, using that computer, do stuff for you like book plane tickets or schedule meetings). On the other end is AI search startup Perplexity, which has recently released Comet, a Google Chrome-like internet browser with an AI-powered assistant. OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent and Perplexity’s Comet allow people to offload the work of navigating the internet to not just learn things, but also buy things.  Both products have the same goal of navigating the internet on your behalf, but go about it in very different ways.  

Both OpenAI and Perplexity are competing to win market share from Google, which is in a weakened state after losing an antitrust case against the Department of Justice in 2024. The government could force Google to spin off Chrome as part of a larger effort to de-monopolize the internet search industry. (Chrome is the dominant browser worldwide, capturing a 68 percent share; Safari is a distant second at 16 percent.)

Perplexity head of communications Jesse Dwyer jokingly describes this race to define the next era of Internet usage as “Browser War 3.” Dwyer says that if Browser War 1 was Netscape vs Internet Explorer in the ‘90s, with Internet Explorer winning due to its superior distribution, and Browser War 2 was Internet Explorer vs Chrome with Chrome winning because of its superior speed, then Browser War 3 is everyone vs Google. The winner will be determined by the product with superior answers. 

But when it’s primarily bots, not humans, navigating through websites, how will that work for companies that rely on web traffic, such as publishers, and, ahem, news websites? To Dwyer, the future is clear: “Some of the internet will be for agents, some of the internet will be for people, and that’s just going to have to be two different business models, it’s that simple.”

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