As AI tools become common in the workplace, managing them is a new challenge. Perplexity's new 'Teammates' feature aims to solve this by offering autonomous AI agents that handle ongoing tasks, with oversight built directly into your workflow.
Meet Your New AI 'Teammates'
Perplexity
has unveiled a significant new feature called 'Teammates,' a set of AI agents designed to function less like single-prompt assistants and more like autonomous digital colleagues. Announced in early November 2026, these agents are built to take on complex, long-running projects and manage them with minimal human intervention. Unlike traditional AI chatbots that respond to one-off requests, a Teammate can be assigned a persistent role, such as a market researcher, a bug report monitor, or a project coordinator. From there, it can plan and execute tasks, run around the clock, and even coordinate with other AI agents to complete larger goals. This marks a strategic push by Perplexity to compete with other major players like OpenAI and Anthropic in creating AI systems that function as integrated members of a professional team.
How It Works: Autonomous and Accountable
The Teammates feature is an extension of Perplexity's existing 'Computer' platform, which gives AI agents the ability to use a desktop, browser, and other tools to perform tasks. When a user assigns a broad goal, a Teammate can break it down into smaller steps, identify which tasks can run in parallel, and spin up additional agents to handle them. Each agent operates in its own isolated computing environment, ensuring security and process integrity. The system is designed to remember project context, user feedback, and past actions, allowing it to build on previous work without starting from scratch each time. This proactive, memory-driven approach is intended to move AI from a reactive tool to a persistent, goal-oriented partner that handles recurring business processes.
Seamless Monitoring via Perplexity and Slack
A key challenge with autonomous AI is maintaining visibility and control. Perplexity addresses this by integrating monitoring directly into familiar workflows. Within the Perplexity application, each Teammate has its own dedicated, persistent thread where users can track its progress, inspect completed work, and provide new instructions or change its plans. Crucially, this oversight extends to popular workplace communication tools. Teammates can be connected to services like Slack, GitHub, and Gmail. This allows an agent to monitor a Slack channel for new information, message human coworkers with updates or questions, and escalate decisions when needed. A manager can see what the AI is doing directly within the project's Slack channel, ensuring transparency without disrupting the team's existing communication habits.
Boosting Productivity and Ensuring Compliance
The intended benefits for businesses are clear: offloading routine, time-consuming work to AI agents frees up human employees to focus on higher-value strategic decisions and analysis. Use cases provided by Perplexity include competitive research, software optimization, and even legal assistance, where an agent could read a contract, compare it to other documents, flag issues, and draft a response for human review. By keeping a human in the loop for final approvals and strategic direction, the system aims to blend AI efficiency with human judgment. The ability to monitor all activity and manage permissions helps address compliance and security concerns, as managers can control what data the agents access and review their actions through audit logs.
The Price of an AI Workforce
This advanced capability is positioned as a premium offering. Access to Teammates is initially available as a research preview exclusively for subscribers to Perplexity's 'Max' plan, which costs $200 per month for an individual. This price point signals that Perplexity is targeting professional and enterprise users who require sustained, heavy-duty AI support for complex work. The company envisions a future where organizations might employ hundreds of these AI agents for every human employee, suggesting this is just the foundational step toward a much larger expansion of AI in the workforce. While the cost may be a consideration, the potential return on investment from automating ongoing projects could be substantial for many businesses.
