Perplexity Teammates: always-on AI agents staff can buy themselves

What Perplexity launched

Perplexity published its Teammates announcement on 4 November 2026, and the feature went live for Max subscribers on the web on 5 November, according to RuntimeWire. A teammate is a persistent agent that takes ownership of a piece of ongoing work, such as watching competitors, following up sales replies or chasing missing supplier paperwork. Each teammate remembers its goals and task history between runs and keeps working on its assignment without waiting for a fresh prompt from the person who set it up.

Business owners should look closely at what a teammate can connect to. Perplexity's help centre says a teammate can be linked to Slack, GitHub, Linear and Gmail. The teammate inherits the permissions of those plugins and of the project it belongs to, and it runs on its own isolated computer with separate browser sessions. Putting a teammate in a Slack channel lets colleagues hand it tasks. PCMag reports that the agent can message real coworkers through Slack and keeps working while its owner is away from the computer. The help centre also says new teammates use Claude Opus 5.5 by default.

The account belongs to the individual

The access model matters most for NZ organisations. The research preview is open only to individual Max subscribers, and the help centre says Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max customers don't get Teammates by default at launch. PCMag puts the Max plan at US$200 a month or US$2,000 a year for one person. PCMag also reports that Teammates are free during a "promotional period" and will later cost an undisclosed number of credits.

Those details point to a likely route into a mid-sized NZ business. A sales manager who already pays for Perplexity Max upgrades on a personal card, connects the company's Gmail or Slack workspace, and tells a teammate to chase overnight enquiries. The company's IT team may never have assessed Perplexity as a supplier. Under the help centre's sharing rules, only the owner can see a teammate's chat, and other people get read-only access. Neither Perplexity's announcement nor the help centre describes admin controls or audit logs for Teammates. For data handling, the help centre sends readers to Perplexity's general privacy resources.

When staff used chatbots on personal accounts, the main risk was what they pasted into the chat window. An always-on agent holding a Slack connection and a Gmail login adds a different risk: what the agent sends, who receives it, and who authorised it, all while nobody is watching the session.

NZ privacy obligations still apply

The Privacy Commissioner's AI guidance says the Privacy Act applies to everyone using AI tools in New Zealand. The guidance recommends a privacy impact assessment before a tool goes into use and regular updates afterwards. The Commissioner treats prompts as information the organisation must protect under IPP5, and notes that IPPs 11 and 12 cover sharing personal information. Picture a sales teammate that reads a customer's order history from a shared inbox and drafts a personalised offer. That one task involves several principles at once. If a staff member set up the agent privately, the organisation still carries the privacy obligations but holds no record of what the agent did.

Cost is the other unknown. Because of the promotional period, early users can't yet see what a teammate running around the clock will cost once credits apply. The help centre says parallel agents and frequent automations use more credits, and it offers auto-refill on the usage page. An agent on a busy schedule with auto-refill switched on could run up charges its owner never planned for.

Where Teammates sit in the agent market

PCMag describes the launch as Perplexity catching up with Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft, all of which already sell agents built for long-running work. What sets Teammates apart is how they're sold. Enterprise agent platforms usually come in through IT procurement, with tenant-level controls already in place. Teammates come in through a consumer subscription any employee can buy, and enterprise access depends on an organisation admin asking for it.

RuntimeWire argues that operators should judge an agent on whether its memory, permissions and escalation rules are clear enough to trust between check-ins. We agree, and we'd add an earlier question for NZ firms: who owns an agent once the employee who created it leaves the company? A personal Max account goes with the employee, and so do the agent's memory and connections.

If you want agents handling ongoing operational work, start with a supervised rollout under accounts the company controls. A personal subscription is a weaker starting point. Our AI agents page sets out how we scope agent work and the guardrails we put around it.

Next steps for NZ businesses

• Check expense claims and card statements for Perplexity Max charges (US$200 a month or US$2,000 a year) on company cards or reimbursed personal cards.
• Review third-party app approvals in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and Slack app installs, for Perplexity connections. Limit connections to an approved list if you don't already.
• Add an agent section to your AI use policy. The section should say which tasks an agent may own, which systems it may connect to, and who signs off before an agent contacts customers or suppliers. Our AI consultancy team can help draft the policy.
• Run a privacy impact assessment before any agent handles customer or employee information, as the Privacy Commissioner recommends.
• If you want to trial Teammates, ask Perplexity for access through an enterprise account so the organisation owns the agents and their data. Set a credit limit and switch off auto-refill before the promotional period ends.
• Give every agent a named owner, and add agent hand-over to your staff offboarding checklist.