Perplexity launches its own take on AI agents for work

Why it matters

Perplexity has entered the growing market for always-on workplace AI agents with Teammates, a product that places it in direct competition with OpenAI's Dots and Anthropic's Claude Duet. Teammates are persistent agents that hold multiple roles within a workspace, drawing on a user's existing projects, skills, and memory within Perplexity's tools. The product builds on Perplexity Computer, which can deploy agents directly on a user's device, but adds the capacity for collaborative, ongoing, large-scale work, with different jobs assigned to each Teammate running at the same time. Users can monitor progress through individual threads in the Perplexity app and interact with agents in Slack. Access is restricted to subscribers of Perplexity's Max plan, making it a notably pricier option than its rivals' equivalents. CEO Aravind Srinivas says the company envisions organizations eventually deploying vast numbers of teammates on behalf of each employee. The launch signals that competitive pressure among AI labs is shifting from chatbots toward persistent, agentic coworkers embedded in daily workflows.