Perplexity launches AI agents with ongoing jobs, memory and Slack handoffs

A recurring assignment can now have a dedicated AI agent inside Perplexity, rather than a new conversation each time it needs attention. The company has launched Teammates for Max subscribers on the web. Perplexity says these agents retain work context, run in the background and bring people in when a decision is needed.

A standing brief instead of a fresh start

Teammates builds on Perplexity Computer, carrying over projects, skills and memory. Computer’s existing plugins, artifacts and code capabilities remain part of the system. The addition is a structure for ongoing work: each agent gets a role, a standing brief and rules for when to involve its user.

Each teammate sits in the sidebar beside projects and history, with one persistent thread that never closes. Users can inspect what it is doing and what it has finished, ask for a status update or change its plans. The interface keeps an ongoing assignment and its activity in the same place.

Perplexity says the agents can monitor work proactively, use desktops and browsers, and coordinate with other agents. They can also follow up with human coworkers in Slack. When an assignment grows, the system can bring in more agents rather than keeping all of the work with the original teammate.

The job includes deciding when to interrupt

Perplexity’s on-call engineering illustration makes the intended division of work concrete. The user asks an agent to watch alerts overnight, examine logs and traces, find the cause of a problem and prepare a proposed code change with a rollback plan. It is also told to match the style of the user’s last 20 merged code changes.

The instructions set two reasons to page the person: a fix needs approval, or the agent cannot isolate the cause within 15 minutes. In the illustrated exchange, the agent traces an error to a configuration change and prepares a fix that still requires approval before deployment. Those are company-provided examples, not independently verified operating results.

Other launch illustrations show how standing assignments and handoffs are supposed to work across different roles:

• Advertising: An agent works within spending caps, pauses weak ad sets and prepares new creative. An opportunity to extend a creator campaign leads to a contract handoff to a legal agent.
• Engineering and testing: An engineering agent prepares a password-reset fix, then passes it to a quality-assurance agent. That agent checks desktop and mobile behavior and returns results for review.
• Legal research: An agent compares a creator’s contract extension with standard terms, flags clauses that differ and prepares suggested changes in a marked-up draft for the user.

Web access first, with promotional credits

Teammates is available now on the web for Perplexity Max subscribers. The company says iOS, Android and desktop versions are coming, but gives no release dates for those versions. The current web release is therefore the available route for creating and managing these agents.

The launch includes a promotional usage grant for every Max plan. After that grant, Teammates draws on credits already included in the subscription, rather than a separately described Teammates allowance. Perplexity’s pricing explanation does not specify the promotional grant’s size or expiration date, leaving the amount of included launch-period usage unclear.