Perplexity's entry into agentic workspaces
Perplexity is stepping into the increasingly competitive market for autonomous work agents with Teammates, a new feature that runs continuously and can juggle multiple roles inside a single workspace. The announcement, covered by The Verge, positions the tool as a direct rival to OpenAI's Dots and Anthropic's Claude Duet—both of which already let users assign parallel tasks to persistent AI helpers. Teammates build on the company's existing Perplexity Computer system, which can deploy agents on a user's device to complete tasks. But unlike Computer, Teammates are designed for "ongoing, large-scale work" rather than one-off automation. Each Teammate can be assigned a different job and execute those jobs simultaneously, creating what Perplexity hopes will feel like a small team of digital employees. Users can keep tabs on progress through individual threads in the Perplexity app, or interact with them directly in Slack—a nod to the collaborative workflows many teams already rely on.
Pricing and platform limits
The catch is access. Teammates are only available on Perplexity's $200 per month Max plan, making the feature dramatically more expensive than comparable offerings from OpenAI or Anthropic. For perspective, OpenAI's Dots and Claude Duet are typically available on lower-tier or even free plans, depending on the provider. This puts Perplexity in an unusual position: it is selling an enterprise-grade agent experience at a price that may exclude many individual users and smaller teams. However, Perplexity's pitch is that Teammates can draw on existing projects, skills, and memory from Perplexity tools you already use—creating a more integrated workflow with less setup. The company also emphasizes that Teammates run 24/7, which means they can keep executing in the background while you focus on other tasks. That always-on capability is a core part of the value proposition, especially for users who want to offload repetitive research, monitoring, or content-generation work.
Where Perplexity sees this going
CEO Aravind Srinivas has ambitious expectations for the feature. In a post on X, he wrote that "over time, we envision every org having hundreds of teammates working for each person." That kind of scale may sound far-fetched today, but it mirrors a broader industry push toward agentic AI that moves beyond single-turn chat into persistent, role-based assistance. For now, the key differentiators for Teammates are:
- Always-on execution across multiple roles at once
- Integration with Perplexity Computer for on-device task automation
- Slack-based interaction for team coordination
- Memory and project continuity drawn from existing Perplexity tools
- 24/7 background operation without constant user prompts
Whether those features justify a $200 monthly subscription remains an open question. But with OpenAI, Anthropic, and now Perplexity all racing to define what a work-focused AI agent should look like, the pressure is on to deliver tangible value rather than just impressive demos. The Verge notes that Perplexity's take is notably more expensive than the competition—so early adopters will be betting that the integration and continuous operation are worth the premium.