In Perplexity’s launch demo for Teammates, an ads agent notices creator ads beating the customer acquisition cost target, preps a bigger campaign, and sends the contract extension to legal. Then, as Digital Trends describes it, “The brand director says to do that every time without asking next time.”
That one line is the product. Perplexity Teammates, announced in a company blog post dated November 4 and rolled out on November 5, are persistent agents that hold a job instead of answering a prompt. They watch a Slack channel, take work from coworkers, keep memory across runs, and page a human when they need a decision. The demo shows how quickly “when they need a decision” becomes “never, for this kind of thing.”
Most coverage has focused on the price. The more useful fact for anyone running a team is who it is sold to: individuals on the Max plan, not companies on an Enterprise contract. And the systems it works in (Slack, GitHub, Gmail) belong to the company.
A personal subscription aimed at shared systems
Teammates require Perplexity Max, which Digital Trends reports costs $200 a month; Perplexity’s pricing page lists $167 a month on annual billing, according to FourWeekMBA. Launch is on the web, with mobile and desktop apps “coming soon,” per Aravind Srinivas’s launch post on X. None of the launch coverage we read describes Teammates on Perplexity’s Enterprise plans, or any admin console, audit export or policy layer for them. ExplainX flags the same gap.
What a teammate starts with is whatever its owner already set up. Perplexity’s own post on X says teammates “work proactively using your Computer tasks, skills, memory, and tools.” Let’s Data Science, summarizing the product page, puts it more plainly: teammates use the same skills and plugins you have installed, “with the same permissions.” The setup plugins Perplexity highlights are Slack, GitHub and Gmail.
So the realistic first deployment at most companies looks like this: one enthusiastic employee pays for Max personally or expenses it, connects their work accounts to Perplexity Computer at some point over the past few months, then creates a teammate and adds it to a team channel. Nobody in IT signed anything. The agent now acts with that employee’s access, around the clock, in front of colleagues who never opted in.
Perplexity did build real isolation between agents. The blog says each teammate “runs in a separate environment, with browser sessions separate from other teammates,” and that saved credentials are encrypted. Owners can review work, take over the agent’s desktop, or redirect it. Those controls protect the teammates from each other and give the owner a steering wheel. They do nothing for the Slack workspace owner, the GitHub org owner or the Google Workspace admin, who are the people whose systems the agent is operating in.
The vendor is measuring success by fewer human prompts
It is worth reading Srinivas’s follow-up posts, because they say what Perplexity is optimizing for. He wrote that Perplexity’s internal workspace has “about 10,000 teammates (within the last 30 days),” which is “already 20x our headcount,” as quoted by FourWeekMBA. He reported that the median employee gets “7x more agent-hours per week from teammates than in September.” FourWeekMBA’s description of his accompanying chart has the share of teammate actions typed by a human falling from 31% to 22%. His framing for where this goes: “you get to a real recursive loop, measurable by less human in the loop.”
That is an honest description of the goal, and for a lot of work it is the right goal. But it means the product will keep getting better at the thing a governance team has to watch: standing instructions that replace per-action approval. The “every time without asking” line in the demo is not a bug in the story. It is the story.
Two cost details matter for anyone budgeting a pilot. Teammates draw on the credits already included in Max rather than a separate allowance, per Let’s Data Science, with a promotional usage grant at launch whose size and end date have not been published. And no source we found states how many credits a teammate consumes per task. An agent that brings in other agents “when the work grows” spends from the same pool, so the first month of a pilot is the only time you will see the real burn rate before the promotion ends.
The gate is in your admin consoles, and two of three are open by default
Because Teammates ship without enterprise controls, the controls that apply are the ones your existing platforms already have. Here is how the three plugins Perplexity highlights behave out of the box, per each vendor’s own documentation:
| Platform | Default for third-party apps | Setting that closes it |
|---|---|---|
| Slack | “By default, any member of a Slack workspace can install an app” (Slack Help) | Admin > Apps and workflows > App Management Settings > Require approved apps (Slack Help) |
| Google Workspace | “Allow users to access any third-party apps (default)” (Google) | Security > Access and data control > API controls > Manage App Access, then restrict unconfigured apps |
| GitHub | “When you create a new organization, OAuth app access restrictions are enabled by default” (GitHub Docs) | Already closed for OAuth apps on new orgs; check older orgs |
We have not confirmed exactly which mechanism Perplexity’s plugins use in each platform (a Slack app install, a Google OAuth grant, a GitHub App or OAuth app). Whatever form they take, they pass through these settings, and that is where the decision belongs. Practically:
- Slack: turn on app approval before someone asks. With “Only allow pre-approved apps” checked, members can request an app but cannot install it, and requests route to Workspace Owners. On Enterprise Grid, Slack says an org-level app management policy turns approval on for every workspace in the org. If approval is already on, decide now whether Perplexity is approved, restricted, or reviewed per request.
- Google Workspace: stop defaulting unconfigured apps to allowed. Google’s option to block unconfigured third-party apps means users “can’t sign in with Google to any third-party apps and websites until you configure those apps.” Pair it with the “allow users to request access” box so the change produces a review queue instead of a support ticket storm. Google warns that tightening access revokes tokens for apps you have not trusted, so inventory existing grants first.
- GitHub: check the old orgs. New orgs are protected, but GitHub’s docs are blunt about the unprotected case: without restrictions, “any OAuth app authorized by an organization member can also access the organization’s private resources.” For GitHub Apps, only org owners can install on the organization, though repository admins can install apps that request no organization permissions. Perplexity’s setup lets users pick which repositories a teammate can reach; make that choice the org’s, not the individual’s.
- Write the standing-instruction rule down. The admin consoles control whether an agent gets in. They cannot see a sentence like “do that every time without asking” typed into a chat. A one-line policy (an agent may not be granted standing approval to send anything to legal, customers, finance or production without the system owner’s sign-off) is the only control that reaches that layer today.
None of this argues against Teammates. A persistent agent that watches a channel and does the follow-up nobody wants to do is the most useful shape these tools have taken, and the separate desktops per agent are better engineering than several rivals shipped with. We compared how the always-on agents from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta decide what to do without asking, and the apps you connect to OpenAI’s version turned out to be the whole security decision there too. What is different here is the buyer. Google’s enterprise agents arrive through a Workspace contract, with an identity an admin can offboard. Teammates arrive through a personal credit card, carrying the access of whoever paid.
For an individual Max subscriber deciding whether Teammates earn the $200, the Perplexity Computer workflows it builds on are the place to start: a teammate is only as good as the projects, skills and connected tools it inherits. For the person who owns the Slack workspace, the job is shorter. Find out this week whether anyone in your company already has one, and set the defaults before the next one asks. If you do approve a pilot, log what each agent did, not just what it cost; the gap between those two records is covered in our piece on agent observability and attestation.