Perplexity's 'teammates' are always-on AI agents that can hire and manage other agents
The agents run around the clock inside Perplexity Computer, split up work, bring in more teammates as needed and ping you for decisions. It requires the $200-a-month Max plan.
DevIsDead Newsroom
Perplexity now sells you a team of AI coworkers who can staff themselves. The company has launched "teammates," personal AI agents meant to handle ongoing work with little supervision, Mariella Moon reports for Engadget.
How teammates work
Teammates run within Perplexity Computer, Perplexity's agent that works through multi-step jobs in the cloud. Perplexity says they build on it with extra capabilities for ongoing, large-scale work.
You give each teammate a role or a task, and they run at the same time. They coordinate with each other, and some can manage others to keep work on track. Hand them more work and they can recruit additional teammates and plan what the newcomers should do. They work in the background around the clock and notify you when a decision is yours to make.
Each teammate gets its own entry in Computer's sidebar showing what it's doing and what it has finished. From that thread, you can hand off more work, redirect it or ask for a status update.
The price of a team
It's only on the Perplexity Max plan, on the web and iOS, which costs $200 monthly or $2,000 for a year. That puts it squarely at professionals and companies, not casual users.
What to watch
Agents that spawn and manage other agents is the right idea for long-running work, and the hardest to get right. Every hand-off is a place where context gets lost, and every self-assigned teammate is more compute on your bill and more actions you didn't directly approve. The design choice that matters most here is the one Perplexity highlights: agents stop and ask when a decision is needed. How often they ask, and how well they judge what counts as a decision, will decide whether this feels like a team or a pile of notifications.
For developers building multi-agent systems, it's a useful product reference: one visible thread per agent, a clear status, and the human pulled in only at decision points.
Scoreboard update: AI +1. Perplexity's agents now recruit and manage other agents around the clock.
Stay undead.
Comments 0