Perplexity is selling the idea that you can stop prompting and start delegating. That’s a bigger pitch than a search box, and a much pricier one. The company launched “teammates,” personal AI agents built to handle ongoing work with minimal supervision.
Teammates live inside Perplexity Computer, the company’s cloud-based agentic assistant for multi-step tasks. Perplexity says they add “additional capabilities for ongoing, large-scale work.” In practice, you give each teammate a role or task, and they all work at the same time. They coordinate with one another. One teammate can manage others, and they can recruit new teammates and plan those newcomers’ tasks as the workload grows.
The interface is simple. Each teammate gets its own entry in the Computer sidebar, where you can see what it’s doing and what it has finished. In that thread you can hand off more work, redirect it, or ask for a status update. They run 24/7 in the background and ping you only when a decision needs a human.
The catch is access. Teammates are limited to Perplexity Max subscribers on the web and iOS, and Max costs $200 a month or $2,000 a year. That’s the same tier OpenAI has used for ChatGPT Pro, and it’s where Anthropic’s top Claude plans sit too. Premium agent features are clearly settling into that price band.
So does this matter? Partly. The idea of persistent agents that supervise each other is where the whole industry is heading. OpenAI’s agent products, Anthropic’s Claude with computer use, and Microsoft’s Copilot agents are all chasing the same goal: software that keeps working after you close the tab. Perplexity’s angle is a sidebar that looks like a team roster, which is an easy mental model for non-technical users.
But the hard questions aren’t answered here. Autonomous agents that spawn other agents can burn through compute fast, and reliability over long-running tasks is still the weak point across the category. A teammate that quietly goes off track for eight hours is worse than no teammate. Perplexity hasn’t said how it handles errors, or how much work a single Max subscription actually covers.
For most developers and small teams, this is something to watch, not buy. If you already pay for Max and live in Perplexity for research, try it on a recurring task like monitoring competitors or compiling weekly reports. Everyone else should wait to see whether the agents hold up and whether the price comes down.
