Perplexity Launches Teammates, Persistent AI Agents That Work Without Being Asked Twice

Perplexity on November 4 launched Teammates, a new feature inside its Computer platform that gives subscribers persistent AI agents designed for ongoing work rather than one-off questions. Unlike a standard chatbot session that resets with each new query, a Teammate retains project goals, task history, and shared files across runs, and can keep working on a task — or watching for changes — without the user starting a new conversation each time.

The launch reflects a broader shift underway across the AI industry: moving from chat interfaces that wait for a prompt toward agents that hold context and initiative over days or weeks. Competitors including OpenAI and Anthropic have pushed similar "always-on" agent concepts this year, and Perplexity's framing — "agents for complex, ongoing work" — makes the ambition explicit rather than treating persistence as a side feature.

Each Teammate runs in its own isolated environment with separate browser sessions, and inherits the user's existing Computer projects, skills, plugins, memory, and permissions rather than starting from a blank slate. Teammates can be added directly to Slack channels, where colleagues can assign them work or request status updates, and they can hand off work to each other — Perplexity's own example describes one Teammate finding website bugs and another preparing the fixes. Saved credentials are encrypted, and users can review completed work, take over the desktop session directly, or redirect a Teammate mid-task.

Perplexity's suggested use cases span marketing (managing posts, ads, and SEO while monitoring competitors), sales (finding leads, preparing outreach, following up on replies), customer support (summarizing complaint trends and tracking cases to resolution), and operations (tracking deadlines, vendors, and paperwork). Setup runs through the web interface: name the Teammate, connect tools such as Slack, GitHub, or Gmail, describe the work and its deliverables, then assign it to a project with an initial task. Teammates are launching first on the web, with iOS access coming soon, and are available to Perplexity Max subscribers; Free and Pro users can upgrade via account settings. Perplexity has not published separate pricing for Teammates beyond the Max subscription itself.

The practical test for Teammates — as for every "persistent agent" product shipping this year — is whether they can be trusted to run unsupervised for days at a time without drifting off task or making costly mistakes a human wouldn't catch until much later. Perplexity's design leans on human-in-the-loop checkpoints (Slack pings, desktop takeover, task redirection) rather than full autonomy, which suggests the company is betting on supervised persistence rather than unsupervised independence as the more defensible version of this idea for now.