New York: Perplexity on February 25, 2026, introduced “Perplexity Computer,” a new artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to act as a general-purpose digital worker capable of planning and executing complex projects over long periods, as competition intensifies among AI firms to move beyond chatbots.
Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas said the company had been “silently” building the product for months as AI models become more capable but harder to deploy effectively on their own.“What has Perplexity been up to last two months? We've silently been working on the next big thing: Perplexity Computer,” Srinivas wrote in a post on X. “Computer unifies every current capability of AI into a single system.”
The company said the system can research, design, code, deploy and manage projects by breaking goals into tasks handled by multiple specialised AI models running simultaneously.
“Computer is a general-purpose digital worker that operates the same interfaces you do,” Perplexity said in a blog post. “It is a system that creates and executes entire workflows, capable of running for hours or even months.”
The launch reflects a broader industry shift from conversational AI toward “agentic” systems that can perform actions autonomously rather than just provide answers.
Perplexity said users begin by describing an outcome, after which the system decomposes the job into subtasks executed by “sub-agents” that may conduct web research, generate documents, process data or call external services.
“The coordination is automatic, and the work is asynchronous,” the company said. “You can focus on other things, or run dozens of Perplexity Computers in parallel.”
Unlike systems built on a single model, Perplexity Computer routes work across multiple AI models depending on the task, an approach the company argues is necessary as models become increasingly specialised.
“As models become more powerful, multi-model orchestration makes a versatile AI harness the most powerful one,” the company said. “Each frontier model excels at different kinds of work, so a full workflow must have access to them all.”
Srinivas said the system treats models as interchangeable tools rather than core products.
“It’s multi-model by design,” he wrote. “When models specialise, they just become tools similar to the file system, CLI tools, connectors, browser, search.”
Srinivas framed the shift more broadly as AI evolving from a tool into the computer itself.
“The computer is one of the best inventions known to mankind,” he wrote. “And when AIs can orchestrate a file system with CLI tools + a browser … AI essentially becomes the Computer, running things on the cloud as you sleep.”
Perplexity said the product will later expand to Pro and enterprise users once testing is complete.
