What Is Perplexity Teammates? The Beginner's Guide to Perplexity's Always-On AI Agents for Work

CodexFuse Team · 2026-11-06T05:36:44.102Z · 24 min read min read

What Is Perplexity Teammates? The Beginner's Guide to Perplexity's Always-On AI Agents for Work

If you have been wondering what is Perplexity Teammates, the short answer is that it is a team of always-on AI agents for work: you give each agent an ongoing job, and it keeps doing that job in the background until the result is ready for your review. Perplexity announced it on November 5, 2026, and it is the company's answer to OpenAI Dots and Anthropic Claude Duet, the other two always-on workplace agents that launched within weeks of it. One clarification up front: this is a product for workplace agents, and it has nothing to do with the July 2026 reports about an internal Perplexity coding tool that happened to carry the similar codename "Teammate".

Before you hand any new AI agent access to your work accounts, keep one safety habit: if you download a model file, a script, or an installer from a third-party mirror, check the file first with a SHA-256 hash generator before you run it. And if you plan to run agents or models yourself on a machine you control, a VPS hosting plan gives you a server of your own, which is the kind of setup self-hosted agent work needs.

What is Perplexity Teammates?

Perplexity Teammates is a team of always-on AI agents that own ongoing work for you. Give a teammate a responsibility, such as triaging bug reports, tracking your metrics, or researching a market, and it plans the tasks and follows through until the result is ready for your review. Each teammate has its own role, and teammates can work with each other when a job crosses their boundaries.

The idea is a change from how most people use AI today. A chatbot answers a question and stops.

A teammate keeps a goal, watches the tools you connect, and acts when something changes, without waiting for a new prompt each time. Perplexity's chief executive, Aravind Srinivas, put it this way on X at launch: "They are personal agents for work. And change the paradigm from writing prompts in a session to giving high-level goals."

Teammates launched as a research preview on November 5, 2026. That is the headline date, and it is worth a small hedge: the public announcement and the Help Center update both landed on November 5, but some trackers date the rollout to November 4, so a source that says November 4 is describing the same rollout, not a different launch. Teammates is available on the web only at launch, for individual Perplexity Max subscribers, with native mobile and desktop apps coming soon.

How do Teammates work day to day?

A teammate works from a job description, not a single prompt. You describe the job, including the source of the work, the expected output, the schedule or trigger, and the audience, and the teammate keeps that role until you change it. It schedules follow-ups, retains memory between conversations, and reaches out when it needs your input.

Behind the scenes, a teammate breaks a large goal into tasks, runs them in parallel across several agents, and adds agents as the work grows. Each teammate has its own desktop computer and browser, so it can work with apps and websites, including sites without a Connector, and test your website from start to finish. When needed, you can take over its desktop and steer its work yourself.

The proactive part is what makes Teammates different from a chatbot. Teammates watch the tools you connect, such as Slack, GitHub, and Linear, and they can start work when something arrives. Perplexity's Help Center gives the example of a teammate responding to review comments after opening a pull request, without anyone asking it to check.

Teammates in the same Project share context, files, and instructions while keeping their own roles, and they can message each other when new information arrives. You can also tag teammates as apps in the tools where you work, so a coworker can hand a teammate work in a Slack channel while it watches that channel. A teammate's chat is visible to its owner, and shared chats are read-only for other people.

How is Teammates different from Perplexity Computer?

Perplexity Computer is the platform Teammates runs on, not a rival product. Computer launched on February 25, 2026, as a cloud-hosted, multi-model agent: you give it one goal, it breaks the goal into tasks, hands them to sub-agents running different models, and returns the finished work. That was 253 days before Teammates arrived, and it is the engine underneath the new product.

The difference is persistence. A Computer session ends when the job is done.

A teammate keeps its assigned role after the job, keeps watching its sources, and keeps working on the next thing that arrives. Computer gave Perplexity the desktop-and-browser control that agents need; Teammates adds ongoing responsibility, memory between conversations, and several teammates collaborating in a shared Project.

The access rules differ too, and this is easy to get wrong. Computer stopped being Max-only on March 12, 2026, when Perplexity opened it to Pro and Enterprise subscribers.

Teammates, by contrast, is individual-Max-only in its research preview, and Enterprise accounts are not included by default. Do not carry Computer's wider access over to Teammates.

Computer's model roster also needs care. At launch it ran 19 models, with Claude Opus 4.6 as the core reasoning engine, Gemini on deep research, GPT-5.2 on long-context recall, Grok on speed-sensitive work, Nano Banana on images, and Veo 3.1 on video. Perplexity has changed that routing repeatedly since launch, so treat the list as a launch-time fact, not as what Computer runs today.

How much does Perplexity Teammates cost?

Here is the first thing the launch-day coverage got wrong, and it matters: the price is not a secret. Some launch reports said Perplexity had not disclosed pricing, but Perplexity's own Help Center page, updated the same day, ties Teammates to an individual Perplexity Max subscription. There is no separate Teammates price, so the cost of Teammates is the cost of Max.

Max costs $200 a month when billed month to month, or $167 a month when billed annually, which is $2,000 a year. Paying annually instead of monthly saves $400 a year, or about 16.7 percent, since 12 months at $200 is $2,400 and 12 months at $167 is $2,004, which Perplexity rounds to the $2,000 annual price.

That is the whole price story: there is no add-on fee and no per-teammate charge published anywhere. If you searched for perplexity teammates pricing, that is the whole answer.

Usage is a separate question from the subscription price. Max subscriptions include a monthly credit allocation that teammates draw on, and complex projects use more credits, particularly when agents run in parallel, work with large files or codebases, or run frequent automations.

Max includes 10,000 Computer credits a month, and credits convert at 100 credits to $1, so that monthly allocation is worth $100 at the published conversion rate. Perplexity also offers free Teammates usage for a launch promotion, but the free usage promotion has no published size or end date, so do not plan a budget around it.

The table makes the entry-point gap plain. Teammates costs 2 times the Dots entry price, since $200 divided by $100 is 2, and 10 times the Duet entry price, since $200 divided by $20 is 10.

In dollars, Teammates costs $100 a month more than the cheapest Dots route and $180 a month more than the cheapest Duet route. That gap is the single biggest fact in any buying decision, and it is also why the comparison sections below matter more than the feature lists.

max_monthly = 200
max_annual_rate = 167
dots_entry = 100
duet_entry = 20
print("Max, monthly billing, per year:", max_monthly * 12)
print("Max, annual billing, per year:", max_annual_rate * 12)
print("Max costs this many times Duet entry:", max_monthly / duet_entry)
print("Dots entry costs this many times Duet entry:", dots_entry / duet_entry)
print("Max costs this many times Dots entry:", max_monthly / dots_entry)
print("Max monthly credits in dollars:", 10000 / 100)

Running it prints 2400 and 2004 for the yearly costs, 10.0, 5.0, and 2.0 for the three multiples, and 100.0 for the monthly credits in dollars.

What models power Teammates?

The models are not a mystery either, despite what some launch reports said. Perplexity's Help Center says you can choose the model each teammate uses and direct it to use different models for different tasks, and new teammates use Claude Opus 5.5 by default. Agents started by a teammate use that teammate's model unless you specify otherwise.

The default matters because it puts Teammates on the same model as Claude Duet, which Anthropic also built around Claude Opus 5.5. The two products differ in almost everything else, but the reasoning engine underneath a fresh teammate and a fresh Duet is the same model family. Perplexity's advice is to use a stronger model for planning and difficult decisions and a faster, lower-cost model for routine work, which is only possible because the choice is yours per teammate.

One thing to keep straight: the model you pick is not the same as the credit cost. Running a stronger model on a long project burns more of your Max credit allocation than a light model on a short job. Perplexity does not publish a per-model credit rate for Teammates, so the honest way to think about it is that the $200 a month buys the subscription and the credit pool, and heavy use can still cost extra through credit top-ups.

How do I set up my first teammate?

Setting up a teammate takes five steps, and the whole flow happens on the Perplexity website. You need an individual Max subscription with access to the research preview first; if you are on the Free or Pro plan, upgrade to Max before creating a teammate, and Enterprise accounts need to ask their organization admin for access.

1. Hover over Teammates in the sidebar and select the plus button to create a teammate.
2. Enter a name or role, such as On-call Engineer or Market Researcher, and choose the teammate's appearance.
3. Open Advanced to add instructions or starting tasks, describing the job, its schedule, its source of work, its expected output, its trigger, and its audience.
4. Click Create and finish setting up the teammate in the chat that opens.
5. Connect the tools it needs from its chat, such as Slack, GitHub, or Gmail, and review the permissions before approving them.

Start with one narrow job, not five. A teammate that watches one Slack channel and files action items in Linear is easy to judge after a week.

A teammate given a whole department on day one is hard to judge at all, and its mistakes are harder to trace. Perplexity's own example jobs are written this way: "Monitor #acme-alerts. Reply to each bug report with a likely cause and a suggested fix."

What can a teammate actually do for you?

A teammate can do any ongoing job you can describe clearly. The Help Center's example projects show the range: map a competitive landscape and write a report with projections, watch GitHub, Linear, and Datadog for new issues and open a pull request with a fix, or reduce a service's latency by testing several approaches in parallel and reporting the measurements.

Perplexity suggests roles such as On-call Engineer, Legal Research Assistant, and Storefront Manager, and its product page adds Sales, Ops, Marketing manager, and Finance. A Finance teammate, for example, drafts a reminder when an invoice passes 15, 30, or 45 days overdue, and a Marketing teammate checks competitors' prices and promotions every week. The pattern is the same in every case: a repeating job, a clear trigger, and a reviewable output.

Two demo examples from the launch show what Perplexity wants you to picture. An ads teammate spots creator ads beating the customer-acquisition-cost target, prepares a bigger campaign, and sends its contract extension to the legal team.

An On-call Engineer detects a spike in HTTP 502 errors after a deployment, traces it to a dropped retry budget, and opens a pull request with a rollback plan. Both are vendor demos from the launch thread, not independent tests, so read them as the intended shape of the work, not as proof of reliability.

The safety design is worth knowing before you connect anything sensitive. Teammates use your installed plugins and skills with the same permissions, saved credentials are encrypted and teammates cannot view them, and each teammate runs on its own isolated computer with its own desktop and browser. Browsing sessions and local cookies are limited to that teammate, and teammates working in a Project follow that Project's permissions.

How does Teammates compare with OpenAI Dots?

OpenAI Dots is the closest rival, and it got there first. Dots was announced on September 29, 2026, at OpenAI DevDay, which is 37 days before Teammates, and it is also an always-on agent with its own cloud computer that works toward your goals around the clock.

Dots runs on GPT-6 Astra, with GPT-6.1 Terra added on November 3, 2026, and it connects to over 4,000 apps through plugins. Anyone searching for perplexity teammates vs openai dots is really asking which always-on agent is worth the money.

The entry price is the sharpest difference. Your first dot is included in ChatGPT Pro or Business Premium at no extra cost, and ChatGPT Pro starts from $100 a month, so Dots costs half the Teammates entry price before you count anything else. Conversations with a dot do not count toward your ChatGPT usage limits, although Codex and ChatGPT Work tasks it starts do count as usual.

Dots reaches you in more places. You can message or call a dot in ChatGPT on desktop, web, and mobile, and message it in Slack and Teams, with texting coming soon.

Teammates is web-only at launch, with mobile and desktop apps still coming. Dots also has a specialist-dot path in preview for organizations, with its own identity, credentials, and IT-provisioned hardware, and OpenAI is working with Microsoft to integrate specialist dots with Agent 365 governance controls.

Control works similarly on both. Dots has Custom Rules that decide what a dot may do alone, what it must ask about, and what it must never do, plus auto-review that checks consequential actions against your instructions.

Teammates has escalation rules per teammate and lets you review, take over, or redirect its work. Neither product lets an agent run consequential work without any human check, and both say so plainly.

One attribution note: the claim that Dots on Pro excludes the EEA, UK, and Switzerland at launch comes from secondary coverage, not from OpenAI's own page, which only says "eligible markets". Treat the exclusion as reported, not as OpenAI's wording, until OpenAI publishes a list itself.

How does Teammates compare with Claude Duet?

Claude Duet is the cheapest way into an always-on agent, and it is the only one of the three that comes to you first. Anthropic announced Duet on October 21, 2026, which is 15 days before Teammates and 22 days after Dots, so all three products landed inside a 37-day window.

Duet is a research preview on a waitlist, included in Pro, Max, and Ultra plans at no extra charge during the preview, and the cheapest way in is Claude Pro at $20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually. Anyone searching for perplexity teammates vs claude duet is really asking for the cheapest way into an always-on agent.

Duet's signature is the morning brief. Each morning it sends a short brief on the most important items across your connected apps, then checks those apps every few hours and messages you only when something needs your attention.

That is the opposite of Teammates, where you assign a role and the teammate acts on triggers. If you want an agent that tells you what needs you, Duet is the design for it; if you want an agent that owns a job end to end, Teammates is.

Duet is also the only one of the three that is already on phones. It is a standalone app on iOS and Android and on claude.ai, while Teammates is web-only until its native apps arrive.

Duet runs on its own virtual machine with its own browser, uses over 6,000 connectors and plugins in the Claude Marketplace, and can pay for things with Link or Shop Pay using a virtual card. Before it sends a message, makes a payment, signs a document, or deletes anything, it shows you what it is about to do and waits for approval.

Access is Duet's weak point. Duet is US-only during the preview, starting with US Pro and Max subscribers, and Team and Enterprise plans are not included yet.

Teammates has no published country list, so do not assume it is available everywhere either; the Help Center and product page give no geography at all. Both products are research previews, and both can misread a thread or misjudge what is urgent, which Anthropic says openly about Duet.

If you want to understand Duet in depth, read what Claude Duet is on this site. The comparison that matters most is the price: Duet's entry is one tenth of Teammates' entry, and that gap buys a lot of patience with a waitlist.

Teammates vs Claude Cowork: who starts the work?

Claude Cowork is the sibling people confuse with Duet, and the distinction is simple: Cowork waits for your assignment, Duet comes to you. Cowork arrived as a research preview on January 12, 2026, reached general availability on April 9, 2026, and was folded into ordinary Claude chat on September 16, 2026. That is 210 days from its general availability to the Teammates launch, and the product has effectively disappeared as a separate brand.

Cowork is task-based. You give it a goal and folder access, it plans and executes across files, apps, and the web, and it returns finished work with a log of every step.

It runs scheduled jobs unattended, and new Pro and Max tasks have run in Anthropic's cloud since October 6, 2026. Teammates is role-based: you assign an ongoing responsibility, and it keeps that responsibility until you change it. Cowork finishes a job; Teammates keeps a job.

Read what Claude Cowork is if you use Claude for knowledge work today, because Cowork is the incumbent for assigned work and it is now invisible inside Claude. Teammates does not replace it; it answers a different question, which is what happens after the assigned job is done and the same kind of work comes back tomorrow.

Who should use Teammates, and who should skip it?

Teammates fits a team that already lives in Perplexity and has repeating work with clear triggers. If your week includes triaging the same Slack channels, watching the same Linear boards, tracking the same competitors, or chasing the same invoices, a teammate can take one of those jobs and keep it. The product is built for that shape of work, and the Help Center's examples are all written that way.

It also fits a Max subscriber who wants several agents at once. Teammates is the only one of the three always-on agents that is multi-agent by design, with several teammates each holding a separate role and messaging each other inside a Project. Dots envisions teams of dots and Duet is a single agent per user in its preview, so a buyer who wants a small team of agents rather than one assistant has only one product to look at right now.

Skip it if you are not already paying for Max. The $200 a month entry price is 10 times the Duet entry and 2 times the Dots entry, and buying Max for Teammates alone is a poor deal unless the agents earn their keep in the first month. A Pro subscriber who wants an always-on agent should try Duet's waitlist first, and a ChatGPT Pro subscriber should try Dots, which is already included in the plan they pay for.

Skip it too if you need mobile apps, Enterprise access, or a published data policy. Teammates is web-only at launch, Enterprise accounts are not included by default, and no fetched source states a Teammates-specific data-retention or training policy. Those gaps may close, but on launch week they are real limits, not missing details.

If you use Perplexity's search and research tools every day and want the full picture of the product family, read how to use Perplexity AI as well. It covers the general product that Teammates builds on, and it is the fastest way to judge whether the Max subscription is worth it for you apart from Teammates.

What are the limits and open questions?

The biggest limit is evidence. No independent hands-on review exists yet, because the product is one day old and every November 5 to 6 explainer is launch coverage based on Perplexity's announcement, its X thread, and its help pages, not a review.

Nobody outside Perplexity has published a test of long-running reliability, handoff quality, permission boundaries, auditability, cost predictability, or alert quality. Treat those as open questions, not as findings, and do not trust any article that claims tested results this week.

The second limit is cost predictability. Teammates draws on your Max credit allocation, and complex projects use more credits, particularly when agents run in parallel or work with large files.

The launch promotion of free usage has no published size or end date, and Perplexity does not publish how many teammates one Max subscription can create or what the per-plan limits are. A buyer should assume the first heavy month will teach them what the real cost is.

The third limit is the name trap. Teammates is the November 2026 public product, Perplexity Computer is the February 2026 platform underneath it, and "Teammate" was a July 2026 internal coding-tool codename reported by Business Insider.

Whether the November product grew out of that internal tool has not been confirmed by Perplexity, so do not use the July reporting as evidence about the November product's features or pricing. The three names describe three different things, and mixing them up is the easiest mistake in this story.

Two smaller cautions round out the picture. TechBuzz's report is stale on this point: it says Perplexity had not disclosed pricing or models, but the Help Center page updated the same day says otherwise, with Max-only access, a $200 a month price, and Claude Opus 5.5 as the default.

And the internal-adoption claim needs the same care: Srinivas said on X that Perplexity had about 10,000 teammates in its internal workspace within the last 30 days, with about 1,000 active on November 4, so treat that count as a claim, not a fact, and do not derive a headcount from the "20 times its headcount" remark. CodexFuse does not offer a Perplexity Teammates tool, so this guide is the whole of what the site can tell you about it today.

Sources

• Perplexity Help Center — Get started with Perplexity teammates — https://www.perplexity.ai/help-center/en/articles/2026102601-perplexity-teammates
• Perplexity — Perplexity Teammates product page — https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/products/teammate
• OpenAI — Introducing dots — https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/
• Anthropic — Introducing Claude Duet — https://claude.com/resources/articles/claude-duet
• TechBuzz — Perplexity Launches Teammates AI Agents to Battle OpenAI — https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/perplexity-launches-teammates-ai-agents-to-battle-openai
• AI Affairs — Perplexity Launches Teammates Agents for Work — https://www.aiaffairs.com/technology/perplexity-launches-teammates-agents-for-work/
• TechSavvyEd — Perplexity's New AI Coworkers Can Take Over Your Workload — https://techsavvyed.co.uk/perplexitys-new-ai-coworkers-can-take-over-your-workload-but-they-dont-come-cheap/
• AlphaSignal — Perplexity's Teammates Gives AI Agents Persistent Roles and Memory — https://alphasignal.ai/news/perplexity-s-teammates-gives-ai-agents-persistent-roles-and-memory
• ToolColumn — AI Personal Agents by Plan: Dots, Muse, Grok Bot, Duet — https://www.toolcolumn.com/learn/ai-personal-agents-by-plan
• AI Wiki — Perplexity Computer — https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/perplexity_computer
• AI Wiki — Claude Cowork — https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/claude_cowork
• LetsDataScience — Perplexity Develops 'Teammate' AI Coding Assistant — https://letsdatascience.com/news/perplexity-develops-teammate-ai-coding-assistant-e5c5164f

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Perplexity Teammates cost?

Teammates has no price of its own. It comes with an individual Perplexity Max subscription, which costs $200 a month, or $167 a month billed annually, which is $2,000 a year. Usage draws on Max's monthly credit allocation, and the launch promotion of free usage has no published size or end date.

Can I use Teammates on the Pro plan?

No. The research preview requires an individual Perplexity Max subscription.

Free and Pro subscribers must upgrade to Max first, and Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max are not included by default. Enterprise accounts can ask their organization admin for access.

Which AI model runs a teammate?

You choose the model for each teammate. New teammates use Claude Opus 5.5 by default, and sub-agents started by a teammate use that teammate's model unless you tell them otherwise. Perplexity's advice is to use a stronger model for planning and a faster, lower-cost model for routine work.

Is Teammates available on mobile apps?

Not yet. Teammates is available on the web only at launch. Perplexity says native mobile and desktop apps are coming soon, and the chief executive said the same in his launch post on X.

Is Teammates the same as Perplexity Computer?

No. Computer is the engine underneath: a multi-model agent platform from February 2026 that takes one goal and returns finished work.

Teammates adds persistent roles, memory between conversations, and several teammates collaborating in a shared Project. Computer is also open to Pro and Enterprise subscribers, while Teammates is individual-Max-only in its preview.