Perplexity used its first-ever developer conference — Ask 2026, held inside a former church in San Francisco's North Beach — to announce a significant expansion of its AI agent platform on March 11.

Personal Computer: Always-On Local AI

The headline product is Personal Computer: software that runs continuously on a user-supplied Mac mini, giving Perplexity's cloud AI persistent access to local files, apps, email, Slack, GitHub, and Notion. The idea is an AI that monitors triggers and executes tasks around the clock, without requiring the user to be present.

Under the hood, the system orchestrates 19-20 specialized AI models — including versions of Claude, Gemini, and Grok — routing each subtask to the most suitable model. Users describe a high-level objective; the agent decomposes it into steps and manages execution autonomously, sometimes over days or weeks.

Security is built in: every sensitive action requires user confirmation, sessions run in isolated sandboxed environments, and a full audit trail logs all activity. A kill switch gives immediate control back to the user.

CEO Aravind Srinivas summed up the vision at the conference: "A traditional operating system takes instructions; an AI operating system takes objectives."

Personal Computer is Mac-only at launch and restricted to Perplexity Max subscribers at $200/month (10,000 compute credits). A waitlist is now open.

Computer for Enterprise

Perplexity also launched Computer for Enterprise, bringing its multi-agent orchestration layer to business customers with SOC 2 Type II compliance, SAML single sign-on, Slack integration, Snowflake connectors, and isolated sandboxing per query. The company says more than 100 enterprise customers requested access in a single weekend after the consumer launch.

The enterprise push puts Perplexity in direct competition with Microsoft Copilot and Salesforce's AI stack.