Marketers Aren't Just Adopting Agents. They're Hooked.

The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO

A joint study from Perplexity and Harvard just gave us the first large-scale behavioral data on how people actually use AI agents. Let’s pat ourselves in the back: marketers are leading the charge.

The research (summary, full PDF) analyzed hundreds of millions of anonymized interactions from Comet, Perplexity’s AI-powered browser, between July and October 2025. Unlike chatbots that just answer questions, Comet actually takes control of your browser—editing docs, sending emails, navigating marketplaces, posting to social. It’s “agentic” in the truest sense: you give it a goal, it executes the steps.

Marketing and sales professionals aren’t just early adopters. They’re power users, scoring above tech workers.

The study uses something called “Agent Usage Ratio” (AUR) to measure how intensively different groups use the agent relative to their population size. Marketing & Sales scored 1.46—the highest of any occupation cluster, including tech workers. Digital marketing and social media profes…