Perplexity launches Teammates: AI coworkers that work on their own around the clock

What's going on

Perplexity, the AI company known for its AI search engine and the AI browser Comet, unveiled "Teammates" on November 5, 2026. Japanese site Gigazine gives the date as November 4 local time. Teammates are AI agents, meaning programs that don't just answer questions but carry out tasks on their own. Unlike a chatbot, they don't wait for your next prompt. They take on a fixed role and work around the clock. Perplexity describes them as virtual coworkers: you give them a high-level goal instead of writing long instructions every session.

For now, Teammates is available only as a "research preview," a public test phase, in the web version. You'll need a Perplexity Max subscription at $200 a month. An iOS version is supposed to follow soon. According to CEO Aravind Srinivas, dedicated apps for phone and desktop are also planned.

How Teammates work

The foundation is Perplexity Computer. The system launched in February 2026 and, according to Gigazine, spreads work across up to 19 different AI models. As Digital Trends explains, Computer used to run in short-lived sandbox sessions, isolated workspaces that disappeared after each job. If you wanted to use an agent long-term, you had to plan everything carefully up front.

Teammates, by contrast, stick around. They have access to everything you've already set up in Perplexity Computer: projects, "skills" (saved workflows), memory, connectors to other services, files and past sessions. According to Gigazine, they plan projects, coordinate work steps and change course when priorities shift. They submit intermediate results for review. You follow their progress in dedicated threads in the Perplexity app.

The key point is that the agents act even without instructions. A Teammate watches the connected tools and reacts as soon as something changes. If it needs a decision, it pauses and asks. Perplexity gives an example: a sales agent notices that a regular customer has stopped ordering. It then checks the order history and support tickets, looks for the cause and, according to ChainCatcher, prepares a follow-up plan.

Working together via Slack and between agents

You can add Teammates to Slack channels, where colleagues can assign them tasks or ask for status updates. Other agents can do the same. The agents hand off work to each other: one might find a bug on the website, for example, and pass its analysis to a second agent that drafts a fix.

Perplexity lists use cases in marketing, sales, customer support, operations and finance. According to Digital Trends, Teammates are meant to triage bug reports, run QA tests, monitor security, analyze data and manage A/B tests, meaning comparisons of two variants of, say, an ad. They're also supposed to learn from mistakes and feedback. In one demo, an advertising Teammate notices that creator ads are beating the customer acquisition cost target. It prepares a bigger campaign and sends the contract renewal to the legal team. The brand lead then tells it to just handle that without asking in the future.

Perplexity has been using the tool internally for a while. According to a ChainCatcher report republished by crypto exchange KuCoin, Business Insider had already revealed the internal tool in July. Back then, it was mainly used for debugging and system monitoring in software development. Srinivas says about 10,000 Teammates were created at the company over the past 30 days, roughly 20 times the number of human employees. That figure comes from the company itself and can't be independently verified.

"We imagine that over time, every organization will have hundreds of Teammates working for every single person." – Aravind Srinivas on X

Security and cost

According to Perplexity's help article, each Teammate runs on its own isolated machine with its own desktop, browser and cookies. You can watch an agent's desktop, redirect it or take control yourself. Plugins and skills run with the same permissions as you. Credentials are stored encrypted, and the agents themselves can't see them. Which projects an agent can access and which Slack channels it watches are configured separately.

The price is steep. Teammates require the Max plan at $200 a month, so Free and Pro users will have to upgrade. According to Shiftdelete, enterprise accounts (Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max) don't have it enabled by default. On top of that, the agents use credits from the Max plan's monthly allowance. Complex or parallel tasks cost more. If you keep lots of agents running nonstop, you can burn through your allowance fast.

The competition

Perplexity isn't alone with this idea. The Verge compares Teammates to OpenAI's "Dots" and Anthropic's "Claude Duet," which also handle multiple tasks at once around the clock. Digital Trends also points to OpenAI's workspace agents, Microsoft's Copilot Cowork, xAI's Grok Bot and Anthropic's Claude Cowork. According to Digital Trends, the OpenAI and Microsoft offerings are aimed more at organizations, while Perplexity is targeting individual subscribers for now. The Verge notes that Perplexity's version is considerably more expensive than its rivals'.

The bottom line

Teammates continue what Perplexity started with the Comet browser and with Computer: a move away from the answer-giving chatbot toward software that takes action itself. What's new is mainly that the agents run permanently, act on their own initiative and divide work among themselves. That puts Perplexity in direct competition with much bigger companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft.

A lot is still unclear. There are no independent tests yet of how reliably the agents work over weeks. Especially with agents that forward contracts or scale up campaigns without checking first, error rates and oversight controls will decide how useful they really are. As Shiftdelete points out, credit consumption and permission management will likely make or break them in day-to-day use. And for many individuals, the $200-a-month entry price is a high bar anyway.