Perplexity Teammates: always-on AI agents for $200/month

Perplexity just shipped Teammates: always-on AI agents that take a standing job, run in the background, and ping your coworkers in Slack. It's a research preview for Max subscribers on the web. The pitch is "hire an agent for the ongoing work." The real question for an operator is simpler: what can it touch, and who signs off before it acts?

What actually happened

In its launch post, Perplexity describes Teammates as "personal agents that can take on that long-running work." Each one plans and coordinates projects and presents results for review. They're built on Perplexity Computer and carry over its Projects, skills, memory, and tool permissions. Per the product page, each teammate gets "a role, a standing brief, and rules for when to bring you in," and lives in one persistent thread that never closes.

The details that matter:

• Plan: Perplexity Max only for now, on the web. iOS, Android, and desktop are "coming soon" with no dates. Digital Trends puts Max at $200/month.
• Connectors: Perplexity names Slack, GitHub (you pick which repos), and Gmail. Add a teammate to a Slack channel and colleagues can hand it work or ask for status.
• Billing: a promotional period of free usage, then teammates draw on the Max plan's monthly credits. Perplexity hasn't published the promo length or the credit amounts.
• Controls: you can review work, take over the desktop, or redirect a teammate mid-task. Teammates send approval requests. In Perplexity's on-call demo, the pull request "needs your approval before it ships."

The demos include a finance teammate that drafts reminders at 15, 30, and 45 days overdue. A sales teammate spots a regular customer gone quiet and prepares an offer. An engineering teammate reads Datadog alerts and opens a PR with a rollback plan.

Why it matters for your business

Those demos are exactly the jobs a small business wants off its plate. They're also jobs where a wrong move costs money: a reminder to the wrong customer, a discount nobody approved, a bad PR merged at 2 a.m. An agent that never closes its thread is an agent that's always holding your credentials.

So scope it like a new hire on day one. Give it one job, not five. Connect only the repos, inboxes, and channels that job needs. Write the "bring me in" rules before the first task: anything that sends money, emails a customer, or merges code waits for a human. And meter it. "Uses your included credits" with no published credit math is not a budget. Watch the burn for the first month before you add a second teammate.

We'd also keep the job definition portable. The brief, the escalation rules, and the data sources are the real asset. Write them down outside Perplexity so you can move the job if pricing or access changes.

Sources: Perplexity, Perplexity Teammates page, Digital Trends.