Starting this week, Perplexity subscribers will have a new agentic tool at their disposal.
Perplexity Computer, in the company’s words, “unifies every current AI capability into a single system.” More specifically, Perplexity says it is a computer user agent can execute complex workflows independently using 19 different AI models, even creating subagents to handle specific problems.
The tool is available now, only on the company’s highest subscription tier, the $200/month Perplexity Max. It runs entirely in the cloud, which might spare it some of the security concerns of other agentic tools like OpenClaw.
TechCrunch hasn’t done a hands-on demo of the new tool, but in example workflows on Perplexity’s website, it is shown handling tasks that involve collecting statistics, financial or legal data, creating analysis, and sharing its findings as finished websites or visualizations.
Perplexity executives invited the press to a background briefing with executives last week to discuss the product and lay out the agenda for the year. The event was intended to include a demonstration of the tool, but the company cancelled the demo because of flaws found in the product hours before the event.
This tool represents the evolution of Perplexity, which made a splash early in the AI boom by wrapping frontier models in familiar user interfaces, particularly its search-engine-like answer service. It then moved on to launch its Comet web browser last summer. Competitors like Google have now changed their products to be more like those built at Perplexity, one executive said, but that’s a threat as much as a compliment.
The company is changing in response to a shifting ecosystem: One of the first AI companies to offer advertising, it abandoned that business late last year, saying last week that it undermined users’ trust in their answers’ accuracy. But Perplexity’s total user base—in the tens of millions of users—pales in comparison to that of OpenAI, which claims 800 million weekly users and began testing ads in ChatGPT this year.
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