About Perplexity
Perplexity is an AI company that builds products and services on accurate AI
Founded in 2022, Perplexity’s mission is to power the world’s curiosity. The company created the Perplexity answer engine, which draws from credible sources to answer questions with in-line citations, as well as the Comet Browser and Comet Assistant. Perplexity also developed Perplexity Computer, an AI system that orchestrates tasks across tools, files, code creation, persistent memory, and the open web. Today, Perplexity answers more than 1.5 billion questions globally each month.
“What really excites me is unblocking human potential, so people can focus on high-value, creative work and delegate the rest to computers in Slack.”
The challenge
Giving AI the context and tool access to produce completed work, not just answers
Perplexity had already shown how AI could turn a question into an accurate, source-backed answer. The team’s next goal was to help people produce the deliverable that followed, whether that was a deck, dashboard, or code change grounded in reliable data.
Doing that required an agent that could use live company context and work across the systems behind each task. Standalone AI tools left people copying and pasting between tabs, filling in missing information, and coordinating every next step themselves. Perplexity set out to build Computer, an AI agent that could research, analyze data, write code, and complete multi-step tasks across connected tools. It would live where teams already communicate and collaborate, letting people hand off a complex task and get the outcome the same way you’d ask a colleague.
How Perplexity works better with Slack
Perplexity went from concept to a working prototype in Slack in six weeks
For Perplexity, Slack was the natural place to build Computer. “Companies run on Slack, and all of the context of their day-to-day work is already there,” said Nate Kupp, Vice President of Engineering.
The team used Slack’s APIs to connect that context directly to Perplexity’s agent harness. A few hundred lines of code produced a working prototype within days, and Computer went from concept to launch in six weeks.
The first version lived in one Slack channel, where teammates could tag Computer, hand off a task, and watch it work. Colleagues could see what it was using, follow its progress, and review the result together.
When Product Marketing’s Jenny Sung reports a bug in a product channel, she can tag an engineer and ask Computer to fix it. Connected to GitHub, Computer opens a pull request and posts it back to the thread, where the engineer can review and approve it without leaving Slack.
“Someone on the team will just do a flyby tag of Computer, and it will one-shot the task, whether it’s a code change or a data analysis task,” Kupp said.
Within its first month, an internal Perplexity estimate put the value of work completed by Computer at about $105 million across engineering, marketing, communications, and sales. The data science team now hands off most analytics tasks that once piled up on a data scientist’s desk.
One legal customer used Computer to build a dashboard that tracks subpoena rules across all 50 states and updates daily, replacing what had been an annual research project. Within the first month, the customer reported that 90% of its law firm partners had adopted Perplexity.
What’s next
Agents take on analysis and coordination in Slack, giving people more time for strategy and creative work
Perplexity expects agents to take on more of the routine work that fills a knowledge worker’s day, including compiling analysis, drafting project updates, and passing information between systems. Running those tasks in Slack keeps agents close to the conversations and company context behind the work, while giving teammates a shared place to direct and review it.
In Slack, Computer can take on the routine follow-through while people shape the ideas, make the calls, and build on one another’s thinking. Perplexity sees that partnership giving teams the space to pursue more ambitious work together.
Install Perplexity Computer from the Slack Marketplace to take work from request to done without leaving Slack.
