Browser agents can work even when sites lack MCP servers

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 24:00

   types of things emerging with perplexity? And brand has network effects, right? Like people tell each other about the brand. But no AI product has within-app network effect. Like it's not like WhatsApp where if you build a WhatsApp rival, Meta has definitely like a questionable brand, right? Like people don't necessarily trust Meta's products. They think like these are ad products. Despite that, nobody is able to switch up WhatsApp that easily because there's all your contacts, your groups, everything's there.

2. 24:33

   AI doesn't quite have that yet, mainly because you can easily export your chat GPT history, upload it somewhere else, or things like that. I think the browser will definitely be one play to figure this out because as you're browsing history, which again, you can still export, but not the same as just getting a CSV dump, and your passwords, your wallet, your agent remembers you. There's a lot of tasks that are running on the browser that you rely on your day-to-day life and work.

3. 25:04

   That's one way to get the product a lot more sticky and create more network effects, especially if multiple people rely on the same set of tasks. You're sharing it with them. That's one way to get all this into the next level. It also sounds like a lot of the stuff that you aspire to solve for users requires integrations or partnerships or something with a bunch of other companies in the world. And if you can get those to be good, then there is somewhat of a network effect in the sense that your product will be good and some competitor would have to build the same integration or same deal with these providers.

4. 25:39

   What does that look like, do you think, in the future? Does Perplexity do deals with all the airlines in the world and all the hotels and all the e-commerce providers? So we already work with Selfbook. they power all the hotel bookings natively done on perplexity we work at TripAdvisor to surface all the reviews of hotels and different places we have the collaborations for the maps we work with Yelp we also like you know for shopping we have a lot of merchants who are directly selling on us and then we work with firmly to like support the bookings like native purchases so there's already a lot of partnerships Shopify is one of our partners.

5. 26:22

   On finance, we work with FMP. Sports, we work with StatsPerform. So there's a lot of data providers already working with us on these verticals, and we just think it's going to expand further as agents start to do things. Different people are okay with becoming MCP servers. Some people are not. Some people just want to preserve their websites. The browser agent will be generic enough that it'll respect whatever the third party wants.

6. 26:49

   because at the end of the day, the agent is the one that's being permitted by the user to act on their behalf. And if there is no MCP server, it's still fine. You can just use these tabs as if the user would have done it. And that's the key advantage of the browser that you do not have if you commit entirely to just the MCP vision. If you commit entirely to the MCP vision, you require these third-party MCP servers to work reliably.

7. 27:17

   The data that they send you with the MCP protocol has to be perfect. Your chatbot has to deal with all these issues that exist. On the other hand, if you just ground up, design it as the way a human would use that website, you have full control over how to do it. You don't have to rely on someone else doing engineering well on their end.