Perplexity just launched Teammates, a set of always-on AI agents built for work. According to The Verge AI, the startup is going straight at OpenAI and Anthropic with agents that can take on multiple roles inside a workspace. The catch is the price: you’ll need the $200/month Max plan to use them.
It’s a big swing for a company most people still know for AI search. Five things stand out.
1. They can work on several jobs at once
You can give each Teammate a different job, and they can all run at the same time. Think of it less like asking a chatbot a question and more like handing tasks to a small team, then checking in later.
That’s the same basic idea behind OpenAI’s Dots and Claude Duet, The Verge AI notes. So Perplexity isn’t inventing a category here. It’s joining a race that’s already underway.
2. They start with your existing context
Teammates pull in projects, skills, and memory from the Perplexity tools you already use. This matters more than it sounds.
An agent that knows nothing about your work needs a lot of hand-holding, just like a new hire on day one. If you’ve already built up context in Perplexity, you skip part of that. It also gives current Perplexity users a good reason to stay put instead of starting over somewhere else.
3. They build on Perplexity Computer
Teammates integrate with Perplexity Computer, an AI system that can deploy agents on your device to complete tasks. Perplexity says Teammates “build on top” of Computer by adding collaboration and the ability to handle “ongoing, large-scale work.”
My read: Computer is the worker you send on a task, and Teammates are meant to be the staff who stick around. That shift from one-off jobs to continuous work is where the whole agent market is heading right now.
4. You manage them in threads and Slack
You can follow each Teammate’s progress through its own thread in the Perplexity app. You can also interact with them in Slack.
The Slack piece may be the most practical part of this launch. People don’t want another dashboard to babysit, and work chat is where a lot of teams already hand out tasks and ask for updates. An agent that shows up there has a much easier path into daily habits.
5. The price is the biggest hurdle
The Verge AI calls Perplexity’s version “much more expensive” than its rivals’ features because it requires the $200/month Max subscription. That puts Teammates out of casual experiment territory.
At that price, Perplexity has to show clear value against tools from two much bigger competitors. Existing Max subscribers have the easiest decision here, since they already pay for the plan. Everyone else has to decide whether this one feature justifies the jump.
What we still don’t know
The Verge AI’s report leaves a few big questions open:
- How well Teammates perform on long-running work
- How pricing works when a whole company wants them
- Which tasks they handle best, since the report doesn’t list specific use cases
Those gaps matter. Always-on agents sound great in a launch post, but reliability is what decides whether a team trusts them with work nobody’s watching.
Hundreds of agents per person
CEO Aravind Srinivas set a very high bar on X: “Over time, we envision every org having hundreds of teammates working for each person.”
That’s a vision, not a product spec, and it raises an obvious question. If you’ve got hundreds of agents, you’ve also got hundreds of threads to review. Managing them could become a job of its own.
The next test is whether teams actually pay $200/month for this when OpenAI and Anthropic offer similar features for less. More details are available at The Verge AI.