Most AI agents still wait for you to ask. Perplexity wants its new teammates to stop waiting. The company launched teammates on 4 November, and the pitch is simple: hand an agent a long-running job, and it plans, monitors, follows up, and brings finished work back for review.
That is a real shift from the Q&A and one-off task model. It also puts Perplexity in a crowded fight with OpenAI’s agent products, Anthropic’s Claude with computer use, Microsoft Copilot agents, and a pile of startups selling AI employees for sales or support.
What teammates actually do
A teammate sits on top of Perplexity Computer and uses the same tools, files, and projects. It coordinates Computer sessions and other teammates, and it keeps memory of goals, task history, and shared files across runs. Tell an operations teammate that an agency needs two weeks’ notice, and it should factor that into later schedules.
The proactive part is the interesting bit. Perplexity’s example is a sales teammate that notices a regular customer has stopped buying, checks order history and support tickets, then drafts an offer or flags a problem to fix first. No fresh prompt required.
Where it fits in a company
Teammates can live in a Slack channel, where colleagues hand them work or ask for updates. They can also pass work to each other, for instance one finding website bugs and another preparing fixes. Perplexity points to four use cases:
- Marketing: managing campaigns, tracking competitor pricing, drafting fixes when results slip.
- Sales: finding stalled conversations, preparing quotes and follow-ups.
- Support: summarising daily complaints and drafting responses for escalated cases.
- Operations: chasing missing paperwork 72 hours before a deadline.
Safety and access
Each teammate runs in its own environment with separate browser sessions. Credentials are encrypted, and users can watch work, take over the desktop, or redirect the agent. For GitHub, you pick which repositories it can touch. That matters, because an agent acting unprompted is only useful if you trust its boundaries.
Does it matter?
Partly. The idea of persistent, self-directing agents is where the whole industry is heading, so this is not unique. What Perplexity brings is accuracy branding and multi-model orchestration inside a product people already use. The weak spot is evidence. The announcement offers scenarios, not benchmarks or customer results, and every example is a best case.
Availability is also narrow. Teammates are on the web for Perplexity Max subscribers, with iOS coming soon, and Free and Pro users must upgrade. Developers and small teams should test it on one contained workflow, like support triage, before trusting it with revenue-facing work. If it holds up there, the competition has a problem. If not, it is another agent demo.
