Perplexity puts its AI agent orchestrator inside Slack

Getting an entire company to adopt an AI agent usually involves convincing everyone to keep yet another browser tab open all day. Perplexity decided to bypass that hurdle entirely by putting its flagship orchestrator right where corporate work already happens.

Perplexity has officially launched Computer as a Slack integration, rolling it out directly to the Slack Marketplace. The agent orchestrator allows teams to kickoff research, write code, query internal databases, and build mini-apps without ever leaving their chat threads.

Born inside a channel as ASI

Computer did not start out as a commercial product. Inside Perplexity, it began as an internal project dubbed ASI, a cheeky double entendre for artificial superintelligence and "a Slack integration."

In those early days, Perplexity's 300 employees used it in public Slack channels to pull data from Snowflake, conduct web research, write code with models like Claude Code and GPT Codex, and draft board memos. In its first four weeks of internal use, it logged an estimated $1.6M in labor-equivalent work. Since opening up, it has completed more than $776M of work for Enterprise, Pro, and Max subscribers.

Using it works just like messaging a teammate. In public channels, you tag @Computer to review partnership proposals, generate slide decks from backlog notes, or synthesize CRM recordings. If a task is messy or confidential, you can drop into direct messages. The bot can ask follow-up questions to nail down requirements before running the workflow in the background.

Thanks to a new MCP connector, Computer can search workspace knowledge, scan message threads, and send updates directly. Everything stays mirrored on the Perplexity web platform, meaning you can trigger a job in Slack and inspect the full artifacts later on desktop.

Why it matters

We think this is one of the smartest distribution plays Perplexity has made yet. Workplace agents rarely fail because of reasoning limits; they fail because switching windows feels like friction. By anchoring Computer in shared Slack threads, Perplexity turns agent prompting into a collaborative, visible team sport rather than an isolated task.

For enterprise teams, this is worth testing immediately if you already live in Slack. Having an orchestrator handle cross-tool legwork, like checking contract terms and spitting out a marked-up Word doc in the same thread where your legal team talks, removes genuine busywork.

That said, giving an autonomous agent MCP access to read message history and post in channels introduces real security risks. Companies will need to be extremely deliberate about channel permissions before unleashing Computer on private corporate chatter.