“Over time, we envision every org having hundreds of teammates working for each person,” as Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas stated on X. The statement marks the launch of Teammates, Perplexity's new work-focused autonomous AI agents designed to compete directly against OpenAI and Anthropic. These always-on agents take on multiple roles inside a workspace, pulling existing projects, skills, and memory from the Perplexity tools already in use.
Perplexity is transforming its business model from a search engine into an enterprise workspace system, entering a contest for software budgets against OpenAI's Dots and Claude Duet. The strategic stakes center on whether continuous background automation justifies a steep enterprise price point. Like OpenAI's Dots and Claude Duet, Perplexity's Teammates run 24/7 to perform an array of tasks simultaneously across different assigned jobs, raising questions about whether the efficiency gains of continuous execution can offset the software expenditure.
Multi-Task Automation in Enterprise Workflows
Teammates integrate directly with Perplexity Computer, an AI system that deploys agents on a device to execute tasks. According to Perplexity, Teammates build on top of Computer by providing the ability to collaborate and complete ongoing, large-scale work.
Teammates build on top of Computer by offering the ability to collaborate and complete “ongoing, large-scale work.”
Users track the progress of these autonomous agents through individual threads inside the Perplexity app and interact with them in Slack. This operational architecture follows previous market movements: on 2026-06-03, the focus was Perplexity Hybrid Inference regarding AI economics and local computing, while on 2026-10-26, Amazon versus Perplexity examined whether digital platforms can block AI agents under Case No.: 3:25-cv-09514-MMC, which detailed a legal clash moving into federal regulatory enforcement, as noted in our coverage on 26.10.
The Pricing Barrier
As The Verge notes, accessing Teammates requires a subscription to Perplexity's Max plan at $200 / month, making the solution significantly more expensive than alternatives.
Perplexity’s take on the feature is much more expensive, however, as it requires a subscription to its $200 / month Max plan.
Corporate buyers face the immediate question of whether deploying automated workers justifies a monthly per-seat commitment when competing systems offer continuous background processing. Evaluating the specific Slack and device-level workflows that require 24/7 execution remains necessary to calculate whether running simultaneous jobs on the Max tier delivers measurable hours saved before rolling out licenses across an organization, addressing whether companies will actually pay $200 a month per user when competitors offer similar agent ecosystems at lower costs.
What doesn’t add up
A $200 monthly price tag for the Max plan firmly pushes Perplexity from lightweight search into premium enterprise software territory. Betting on deep integration between local Computer execution and Slack threads sounds ambitious, yet it directly collides with competing options like OpenAI’s Dots and Claude Duet. The friction is clear: companies are asked to foot a steep bill for autonomous digital workers while wrestling with whether round-the-clock background tasks actually offset the cost. Pricing artificial teammates at premium software tiers raises the bar on whether continuous background automation delivers measurable savings or just costlier search.