Dive into the key findings of the first large-scale field study on the adoption, usage intensity, and use cases of general-purpose AI agents, drawing on hundreds of millions of anonymized user interactions with Perplexity’s Comet Assistant. This paper tracks the frontier shift from conversational LLM chatbots to action-oriented AI agents, which are defined as AI assistants capable of autonomously pursuing user-defined goals by planning and executing multi-step actions.
Key insights from the paper include:
- Who is Adopting: Adopters are concentrated in digital or knowledge-intensive sectors, with Digital Technology representing the largest occupational cluster. Adoption and usage intensity show strong positive correlations with higher GDP per capita and educational attainment.
- What They Are Doing: Agent use cases are highly focused: Productivity & Workflow (36%) and Learning & Research (21%) collectively account for 57% of all agentic queries. The most prevalent tasks include assisting exercises and summarizing/analyzing research information.
- Implications: The diffusion of these increasingly capable AI agents carries important implications for researchers, businesses, policymakers, and educators.
