Perplexity has begun offering Teammates, agents that take on a role, such as watching a bug channel or tracking a team's numbers, and keep doing it between conversations. You give each one a responsibility, it works out the steps, and it comes back when the result is ready or when it needs a decision.
The brief is where the work is
Setting up a Teammate asks for four things: where the work comes from, what it should produce, when it should start, and who gets the result. That sounds easy until you try it, because most recurring work lives in habits. Picture a dispatch manager who keeps an eye on supplier emails and the inbound Slack channel. She has probably never listed what counts as a problem. To brief a Teammate she has to decide whether a one-day delay matters or only a change of carrier does, which customer orders to list first, and who on the team should see the result. If checking by hand takes her twenty minutes twice a day, that is about three hours a week.
Those decisions were always part of her job. They never had to be said out loud. An agent that starts work on its own makes the unwritten rules visible, and the person who has already written them down gets the benefit first.
You decide which steps it takes alone
In Perplexity's demo, an advertising Teammate notices that some ads are winning customers for less than the target cost, prepares a bigger campaign and sends the contract extension to the legal team. The brand director then tells it to do the same next time without asking.
That is the right way to start for most people: let the Teammate ask before any step that spends money or reaches other people, then loosen one step at a time as it proves itself. Each Teammate works on its own computer that you can watch and take over, and it acts with the permissions of the accounts you connect. So give it what you would give a new hire, only the channels and the inbox the job needs, as the setup guide advises for GitHub.
What is new, and what it costs
Perplexity is not first. OpenAI's always-on dots in ChatGPT arrived in September, and Anthropic's Claude Duet followed in October. Perplexity's own Computer could already run recurring jobs on a schedule. What is new is a standing role: you can create several Teammates, each with its own responsibility, sharing a project's files, and coworkers can hand them work by tagging them in Slack.
For now it is a research preview on the web for individual subscribers to the $200 a month Max plan. Company accounts are not included by default, and phone and desktop apps come later. Max includes a fixed monthly pool of credits, and Teammates draw on it. Agents running in parallel, big files and frequent automations use more, so a narrow trigger such as "when a supplier changes a date" will cost less than "watch everything".
For her, three hours a week back is about 13 hours a month, so $200 comes to roughly $15 an hour. That is a fair price if the brief is clear, and a poor one if a vague brief leaves the Teammate running without a clear job.
Perplexity's chief executive, Aravind Srinivas, wrote that over time he envisions hundreds of Teammates working for each person in every organisation. Whether or not that number arrives, the direction is clear. When a person has many agents, the limit is how clearly they can say what they want and which steps need their approval. That is closer to managing than to using software.
A good first step is to list the things you do every week that begin when something arrives: an email, a message, a form. Each one is a four-line brief waiting to be written.