What is new

Perplexity, the company best known for its AI-powered search engine, has introduced a new product called Teammates. These are AI agents designed to run continuously in the background of a workspace, each assigned to a specific role, and able to work alongside human employees rather than just answering one-off questions.

The idea echoes similar launches from rivals: OpenAI has a comparable tool called Dots, and Anthropic offers one called Claude Duet. All three companies are effectively betting that the next stage of workplace AI is not a chatbot you query occasionally, but a set of persistent digital workers that stay active and keep making progress on tasks even when nobody is actively prompting them.

How it works

Each Teammate can be assigned a distinct job within an organization's workspace, and multiple Teammates can operate at the same time, each with their own ongoing project. According to Perplexity, Teammates draw on the projects, skills, and memory already built up inside the Perplexity tools a user or team has been using, so they are not starting from a blank slate but inherit context from previous work.

Teammates are built on top of Perplexity Computer, the company's existing system for deploying AI agents directly on a user's device to carry out tasks. Perplexity frames Teammates as an extension of that capability, aimed specifically at supporting collaborative, large-scale, and ongoing work rather than discrete one-time tasks.

Users can track what each Teammate is doing through a dedicated thread inside the Perplexity app, similar to a running conversation or activity log for that agent. Teammates can also be interacted with directly inside Slack, which lets them fit into communication channels teams already use rather than requiring everyone to check a separate app.

  • Teammates are AI agents that run continuously (described as 24/7) within a Perplexity workspace.
  • Each Teammate can be given a different role or job, and several can work in parallel.
  • They pull in context from existing Perplexity projects, skills, and memory.
  • They build on Perplexity Computer, the company's on-device agent-deployment system.
  • Progress can be tracked via individual threads in the Perplexity app or through Slack.
  • Access requires a subscription to Perplexity's Max plan, priced at $200 per month.
  • Comparable products exist from OpenAI (Dots) and Anthropic (Claude Duet).

Why it matters

For general background: an AI agent, in current industry usage, typically refers to a system built on a large language model that can take actions over multiple steps toward a goal, rather than simply replying to a single prompt. That might mean searching for information, running a task on a computer, calling other software tools, and checking its own progress along the way, often in a loop until the task is judged complete. Making such agents 'always-on' is a further step: instead of waiting for a person to start a session, the agent keeps working in the background and can be checked in on later, more like a colleague than a search box.

This launch matters for practitioners because it signals where the leading AI companies think enterprise value will come from next: not just better single-turn answers, but agents that persist, specialize into roles, and integrate into existing workflows and chat tools such as Slack. For teams already using Perplexity for search or Computer for device-level task automation, Teammates is positioned as a natural next layer, reusing data and context the organization has already accumulated rather than starting fresh.

Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, has described a future in which every organization has hundreds of Teammates working on behalf of each person, suggesting the company sees this as a foundational shift in how work gets divided between humans and AI systems, not a minor feature add-on.

Limits and open questions

The most immediate practical limit is cost: Teammates are only available to subscribers of Perplexity's Max plan, at $200 per month, which the source notes is considerably more expensive than comparable offerings. That price point puts it well beyond casual or individual use and positions it squarely as an enterprise or power-user tool.

The announcement, as reported, does not detail how reliable Teammates are at completing complex or ongoing work without human correction, what kinds of roles they can realistically perform, how errors or stalled tasks are surfaced to users beyond the thread-tracking mechanism, or how data security and permissions are handled when agents operate continuously inside a company's workspace and Slack channels. It also does not specify technical details such as which underlying models power Teammates or any benchmark results demonstrating their capability.

How to try it

Access to Teammates requires an active subscription to Perplexity's Max plan, which costs $200 per month. Once subscribed, users can assign Teammates to different roles, monitor their activity through threads in the Perplexity app, and interact with them inside Slack. The source does not provide further detail on setup steps, available roles, or a free trial option.

Sources