Will ‘Comet’ Replace Recruiters?

AI Will Not Replace Recruiters. But Recruiters Who Use AI Will Replace Those Who Don’t.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas recently made headlines declaring that his AI-powered browser, Comet, could fully replace recruiters (and even executive assistants) within six months.

On The Verge’s Decoder podcast, he explained:

“a recruiter’s work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs. And then you’ve got to do state tracking,”

As a company building AI-native recruiting tools, we get the temptation to make bold claims. But we also know better. Two of Berribot’s three founders have lived the recruiting life for over a decade. They’ve influenced the hiring of millions of candidates, lead large hiring teams, solved for show rates, drop-offs, and fraudulent profiles.

We know that while AI will make a lot of aspects of recruiting way more efficient, faster and even convenient, recruiters will be a key part of the equation.

What can AI automate?

Let’s be clear: AI is transforming recruiting. Today’s intelligent systems are capable of:

• End-to-end outreach: From sourcing to personalized messaging to automated follow-ups

• Scheduling and briefing: No more calendar Tetris or dropped threads

• Interview support: Real-time note-taking, question sequencing, and even behavioral analysis

• Candidate vetting: Using voice biometrics, facial verification, and skill-based assessments

Our goal has always been to solve for recruiter outcomes which is to “hire the best candidate”.

While this is early days (at an industry level), AI agents can now talk to the candidate and filter them basis a range of skills, behavioral and trust based assessments.

But, AI can’t do it alone.

Recruiting isn’t just about tasks. It’s about trust. Fit. Persuasion. Nuance.

The decision to hire someone isn’t purely computational. There’s a human element to it. Culture fit, motivation, potential, all of these live in a gray zone that can’t be fully modeled (yet). Recruiters still guide critical judgment calls, influence hiring managers, and build candidate relationships. They are strategic, not just operational.

That’s why these systems need to be built for collaboration rather than completely independent systems that run and spit out an output: AI handles the what and how fast, recruiters drive the why.

Augmented Recruiting Agents

We believe the future belongs to Augmented Recruiting Agents (ARAs). AI systems purpose-built to work alongside recruiters, not instead of them. These agents train with, learn from, and free recruitment teams to focus on higher-order work.

A way to think about it:

• AI performing screening interviews for human vetting further up the chain

• Proactive agentic workflows that flag anomalies but escalate to a recruiter

• Insights from thousands of interactions distilled into recommendations, not decisions

This is not plug-and-play automation that immediately spits out a magical candidate. This is symbiotic orchestration.

In short, building real-world hiring agents means designing pipelines that manage multiple autonomous steps, but also hand off critical judgment moments to humans. Without it, the whole system fails.

Adding nuance to the debate

However, in the interest of keeping the conversation grounded, this is the nuance.

1. Claim: AI will fully replace recruiters in 6 months

   Berri Bytes Take: Tools and automated workflows will clear busywork but will leave strategic decisions to recruiters.

2. Claim: Our agent is plug and play and will solve recruiting

   Berri Bytes Take: You need systems that learn your pipeline, not just execute templates. It will evolve.

3. Claim: Recruiters will vanish long term

   Berri Bytes Take: Those who embrace AI will lead the next hiring frontier.

The Hybrid Flows of the Future

The fastest-growing teams we work with are already blending recruiter instincts with AI muscle. They’re screening thousands at once and nurturing talent with empathy. They’re automating call reminders and training agents to sound like their brand.

This is not AI vs. recruiters. It’s AI with recruiters. Together, they form the most potent hiring team the industry has seen.

Parting Thoughts

Here are some interesting parting thoughts that are worth explaining more in future posts.

1. Paradox of human touch: As recruiting gets more automated, the value of human interaction actually increases. It’s about where the scarcity premium lies. And scarcity will shift toward trust, empathy, and intuition.

2. AI might replace the Resume before it replaces the recruiter. Agentic systems can generate candidate graphs, skill maps, and inferred potential eventually making the static resume obsolete long before human judgment is.

3. Great recruiters will become systems thinkers. The new recruiter’s superpower is designing systems that attract, vet, and convert talent at scale.

4. AI will help some companies fix bad hiring habits. This one maybe a bit controversial but many orgs have inconsistent rules, unclear funnel ownership, and poor interview hygiene. AI might force their hand to narrow to patterns that pay off for the company.

Thanks for reading.