Perplexity's always-on Teammates agents can watch Slack and Gmail. A GC's PM team should set access rules before trying one
Perplexity's new Teammates are named agents that keep working without a prompt and can read your connected tools. For a project team, the useful question is what you let one see and who answers for what it sends.
Perplexity launched Teammates this week: named AI agents that keep working on an assignment without a new prompt, can watch connected tools like Slack, Gmail and GitHub, and can take requests in Slack. For a GC's project team, that makes the decision a permissions question first and a productivity question second.
What did Perplexity actually release?
According to Perplexity's announcement, a Teammate is built for ongoing, long-running work. You name it, connect tools, describe the work (sources, deliverables, timing), assign it to a project and give it a first task. It then monitors, follows up and presents results for review.
Reported details:
- It runs in its own isolated desktop and browser environment, with separate sessions.
- It inherits the permissions, projects, skills and memory of the user's existing Computer setup.
- Users can review completed work, take over the desktop or redirect it.
- It is available to Max subscribers on the web, with iOS "soon." The post gives no prices or usage limits.
- Secondary coverage says Teammates draw on the Max plan's monthly credits, so running several nonstop could burn through an allowance.
Perplexity's listed use cases are marketing, sales, support and operations. Construction is not mentioned. I found no independent testing yet, so the claims rest on the company's own materials.
Where could this fit on a project team?
The closest match is the follow-up work that PMs and project engineers do by hand. A Teammate could, in principle:
| Task | Why it fits | Keep a human on |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly RFI and submittal status summary | Repetitive, read-heavy | Checking against the log |
| Chasing overdue responses | Persistent follow-up is the point | Anything sent outside the company |
| Watching a shared inbox for owner notices | Always-on is useful here | Deciding whether a notice triggers a contract deadline |
| Pulling meeting action items from Slack | Low risk | Assigning ownership |
None of this is proven on a jobsite. A general agent does not know your contract's notice clauses or what a "no exceptions taken" stamp means for procurement.
What should a GC lock down before trying one?
An agent that can read Gmail and Slack can read pay applications, change order pricing and owner correspondence. Before connecting anything:
- Give it its own account or a limited folder, not a PM's full inbox.
- Start read-only. Summaries to a PM, nothing sent externally.
- Name an owner. One person answers for what the agent sends under the company's name.
- Set a credit cap and check usage after the first week.
- Check your owner and sub agreements for limits on putting project documents into third-party AI tools.
Our recent coverage of agents raising their own spending caps makes the same point: access is the risk, and approvals are the control.
The takeaway
Try one on a single closed-out project or a low-stakes weekly report, with read-only access, for two weeks. If the summaries match your logs, widen the scope. If they don't, you learned that cheaply. Don't hand an always-on agent your live inbox because the demo looked good.
- What are Perplexity Teammates?
- Teammates are named, persistent AI agents inside Perplexity's Computer platform. They keep working on an assignment without a new prompt, remember past work and feedback, and can take requests in Slack.
- Can a construction project team use Perplexity Teammates today?
- Only on Perplexity's Max plan, on the web first, with iOS listed as coming soon. Perplexity says access and features will expand in the coming weeks, and it has not published usage limits in its announcement.
- Is it safe to connect an AI agent to a project email account?
- Treat it like onboarding a new hire: give it its own account or a limited folder, not a PM's full inbox. Perplexity says each Teammate runs in a separate environment and inherits existing permissions, so what the agent can see depends on what you connect.
- What should a GC test with an always-on agent first?
- Pick read-only, low-risk work such as summarizing the week's RFI and submittal status for a PM to review. Keep anything sent to owners, architects or subs under human approval.