Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity co-founder and CEO, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the company's most recent product launch, what products the new shopping assistant will be able to show, and much more.

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

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Perplexity AI has unveiled a new AI-powered shopping assistant designed to enhance the online shopping experience for consumers. The tool enables users to research products, compare options, and make purchases directly within the Perplexity app, featuring one-click buying and free shipping. 

The company is inviting merchants to join its platform through the Perplexity Merchant Program and is already collaborating with Shopify to facilitate seamless transactions. While Amazon products are not specifically confirmed, Perplexity AI expressed openness to working with all major retailers. The launch reflects a broader industry trend of integrating AI into e-commerce, as competitors like OpenAI and Google also expand their AI-driven search and shopping capabilities.

Perplexity CEO on new AI-powered shopping assistant

Welcome back to Squawk Box. Got some news from Perplexity AI this morning. The company launching an AI powered shopping assistant. That should help it with consumers as holiday bargain hunting ramps up to us right now to talk about this and the broader competition in AI. Arvind Trevis Srinivas is the CEO of Perplexity AI. And we love having you on the broadcast. Congratulations on the new launch. Let's talk about that piece of it and then let's get into the broader sort of question of where things are. Open AI recently releasing its own search product. How important is the shopping piece for you. Yeah thank you for having me again here Andrew. So shopping is really essential because it's just one of these verticals where strongly you convey that all these AI products are moving beyond just giving you answers. Right. A lot of people say which AI products are really used. They're all looking like the same. They're all giving me answers. Some get some use of apps some don't. But you need to actually enable actions. What do you do after an answer purchase a transaction. So all these products need to get there. So shopping is the first step for us to actually get there. And we're very happy to be the first to do that. We're at perplexing now becomes a one stop solution to not just research your products on what to buy but you can actually go and buy it right there natively on the app. So you've with one click buy which is which is revolutionary e-commerce even 20 20 30 years ago. We're bringing into AI products and we're giving free shipping for all people. And they can just take your phone take their phone and like point it at some product that they want to buy and just ask where can I buy this and they can just get get it right there. And this is really powerful. So people can just compare ask questions they could never ask before like help me build a library or help me host a disco party. What all do I need to buy. And you just get all the products right there and compare and all the reviews of surface from so many different parts of the web and you just fulfill your transactions right there. Well that's what I was going to ask about what products you surface what products you don't surface. Obviously Amazon has a huge its own search business inside its own platform. Can you get Amazon products on it. Are you. You know I hate to use the word scraping but you know when you look at reviews on on other sites and you're pulling that is everybody allowing all of this to happen. Are some going to block you. How's it going to work. Yes. So we are also introducing this thing called the merchant program the perplexity merchant program. We are inviting merchants to work with us because we think customers consumers love this and that's always the long term correct direction. And so if we can collaboratively build this next generation shopping system for all customers where merchants can bring their catalog to us and product specs and help in the checkout flow that way we can like you know provide this experience to everybody. And we're already working with Shopify. We're enabling people to check out products on Shopify through shop pay and bringing bringing it right into our search results. I mentioned Amazon because Jeff Bezos is a very high profile investor in your company. Is Amazon involved. And do you think that they will be. I mean are you ready to talk about who's currently in the program. But we are happy to work with everybody and that includes Amazon too. Let's switch gears for a second and just talk more broadly about the search business if you will and how AI relates to it. Open AI recently announced its own search product. How do you think about that product versus your own product versus what you're seeing now from Google with some of the AI features that it's added. Yeah like I said all these products are currently like very similar in the minds of the average consumer or like they're all giving me answers to questions. I think you need to go beyond that. You need to provide like real time information on verticals that matter in everyone's lives. Sports finance like we did the election hub and the elections were going on. Today we're doing shopping. We're enabling not just information but actions transactions. So our products need to move to a direction where like commerce and like businesses and consumers transact with each other and like everyday information is provided in a much more like end to end workflow and custom you eyes. So that's what we are working on. And we feel like we are ahead of everybody else in that direction. And I think that's what we need to keep doing more of more verticals travel finance like a lot of things need to be done here.

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Perplexity CEO on new AI-powered shopping assistant

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