Harvard Research Reveals AI Brokers Excel in Cognitive Duties Past Scheduling

Whereas these brokers are good at reserving lodges or dealing with rote chores, over 57 per cent of all agent exercise in Perplexity’s Comet browser was centered on cognitive work, in line with a brand new research launched by Harvard College researchers in partnership with the AI search startup on Tuesday, December 9.

The research, which researchers claimed was the primary large-scale effort to grasp how persons are utilizing AI brokers, discovered that 36 per cent of the commonest actions carried out by Perplexity’s AI browser agent had been productiveness and workflow duties, whereas 21 per cent of the duties needed to do with studying and analysis.

These findings are based mostly on the researchers’ evaluation of lots of of tens of millions of anonymised interactions from Comet and Comet Assistant customers. It was centered on three basic questions: Who’s adopting AI brokers? How intensively are they utilizing them? And what duties are they delegating to their AI assistants?

Notably, productiveness and workflow-related duties additionally had the very best retention charges. Through the use of AI brokers for studying or analysis duties early on, persons are additionally more likely to turn out to be long-term energetic customers, as per the research.

These findings come at a time when corporations throughout industries want to undertake AI brokers. They problem some frequent narratives that would doubtlessly reshape how brokers might be used to be taught, work, and resolve issues.

“This research supplies the primary empirical proof that we’re transferring towards a hybrid intelligence financial system. The dominance of cognitive duties in our information means that AI brokers are scaling human cognitive work. As these instruments mature, we anticipate the “stickiness” of productiveness duties to deepen,” Perplexity mentioned in a weblog put up.

Whereas 2025 was purported to be the 12 months AI brokers took off, the surge in utilization or adoption charges has not but arrived. A number of specialists reminiscent of Andrej Karpathy, a famed AI researcher, have additionally questioned the progress of agentic AI.

“I’m not really certain who mentioned this however they had been alluding to this being the 12 months of brokers with respect to LLMs and the way they had been going to evolve. I used to be triggered by that as a result of there’s some over-prediction occurring within the trade. In my thoughts, that is extra precisely described as the last decade of brokers,” Karpathy mentioned on a current podcast hosted by Dwarkesh Patel.

Who’s utilizing AI brokers? And the way?

Six core occupations drove 70 per cent of all agent exercise within the Comet browser, in line with the research. Whereas digital technologists led on quantity ( accounting for 30 per cent of queries), different fields like Advertising and marketing, Gross sales, Administration, and Entrepreneurship, demonstrated the very best “stickiness”, as per the research.

Researchers additionally discovered that customers are deploying Comet Assistant, Perplexity’s AI browser agent, to unravel the precise friction factors of their trade. For example, over 47 per cent of queries from finance professionals had been associated to productiveness duties. Queries from college students, then again, had been made up of 43 per cent of studying and analysis duties.

The research additional highlighted a key pattern in person behaviour, the place folks could begin off utilizing the AI agent for low-stakes duties like film suggestions or basic trivia and step by step shift to extra intensive productiveness duties. “A person would possibly begin by asking a couple of trip spot, however as soon as they use the agent to debug a Python script or summarize a monetary report, they not often return,” Perplexity mentioned.