Perplexity launches AI colleagues: 10,000 already deployed internally, 20 times the number of its human employees.

Beating AI Express News: Perplexity has officially launched Teammates, an AI Agent tool designed to handle specific tasks long-term like human employees. CEO Aravind Srinivas revealed that roughly 10,000 AI Teammates have been created internally at the company over the past 30 days—20 times the total number of its human staff. Built on Perplexity Computer, Teammates lets users assign roles, goals, and permissions to the AI, which then continuously tracks work progress, proactively identifies issues, and uses tools to address them. Multiple Teammates can also divide tasks among themselves and communicate with human colleagues via Slack. For instance, a sales Agent can spot that a customer hasn’t placed an order for a long time, automatically investigate the cause, and prepare a follow-up plan. A development Agent, upon finding a website bug, can pass the task to another Agent to write the fix code. Each Agent has an independent workspace, retaining project memory and task history, allowing users to check progress, adjust direction, or take over operations at any time. The product has been in development for a long time: Business Insider exposed Perplexity’s internal Teammate tool back in July, when it was mainly used for software engineering tasks like bug fixing and system monitoring. Now, it has expanded to cover marketing, sales, customer service, and operations, adding long-term task management and cross-Agent collaboration features. Teammates is currently available as a research preview to Perplexity’s $200/month Max subscription users, with initial web support, and native mobile and desktop versions set to launch later.