At its first developer conference, held in a former North Beach church, Perplexity unveiled Personal Computer, expanded its cloud agent to enterprise, opened up finance data tools, and staked its identity on a single claim: AI is the computer now.
Two weeks after launching Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent that can orchestrate 20 frontier models to execute multi-step workflows autonomously, the company used its inaugural Ask 2026 developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to dramatically widen the platform’s reach.
The centrepiece of announcement is Personal Computer: software that runs continuously on a user-supplied Mac mini, merging local files, apps, and sessions with Perplexity’s cloud-based Computer system.
The idea is to give the AI persistent, always-on access to everything on your machine, Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Notion, Salesforce, so it can monitor triggers, execute proactive tasks, and carry work forward around the clock without requiring the user to be present.
Sensitive actions require explicit approval, every session generates a full audit trail, and a kill switch gives users immediate control.
Personal Computer is software, not hardware. Perplexity is not manufacturing a device. The Mac mini acts as the always-on host; Perplexity’s platform connects to it remotely and can be controlled from any device. Access is restricted to Perplexity Max subscribers, the company’s highest tier, priced at $200 per month, which includes 10,000 monthly compute credits, and will be Mac-only at launch.
A waitlist is now open; Perplexity says it will provide support for the initial cohort.
CEO Aravind Srinivas framed the product’s ambition at the conference: “A traditional operating system takes instructions; an AI operating system takes objectives.”
The conference itself was held inside a former church in San Francisco’s North Beach neighbourhood, a setting that seemed deliberate.
Beyond Personal Computer, Perplexity is also bringing its Computer platform to enterprise customers. The enterprise version adds SOC 2 Type II compliance, SAML single sign-on, audit logs, and isolated sandboxing for each query.
It connects natively to Snowflake, Salesforce, HubSpot, and hundreds of other enterprise platforms, allowing teams to query data warehouses, pull CRM context, and build financial models without waiting on a data or analytics team. Enterprise teams can also interact with Computer directly inside Slack, via direct message or shared channel.
Perplexity’s internal usage data, cited by VentureBeat, illustrates the model-agnostic positioning that underpins the whole Computer strategy: in January 2025, 90% of enterprise queries routed to just two AI models; by December 2025, no single model accounted for more than 25% of usage.
The company is explicitly betting that enterprises will increasingly demand access to whichever model is best for a given task, rather than committing to a single provider’s stack.
The conference also brought a significant expansion to Perplexity Finance. The company says 75% of its users already ask finance-related questions each month, and Computer now has direct access to more than 40 live data tools pulling from SEC filings, FactSet, S&P Global, Coinbase, LSEG, and Quartr, among others.
No additional licence or API key is required, and every figure is traceable to its source. Computer can use these tools to build interactive dashboards, Excel models, and full financial applications.
For developers, Perplexity announced new APIs at the conference, though the company’s blog post does not detail their full scope. The February launch of Perplexity Computer had already included a usage-based API; this expansion appears to deepen the developer surface area, consistent with the conference’s purpose as a developer-facing event.
Perplexity’s core challenge, articulated clearly by Axios, is convincing customers to pay $200 per month to a company that does not build its own frontier models, when they could go directly to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.
The answer Perplexity is betting on is orchestration: not any single model, but the harness that deploys all of them intelligently. VentureBeat puts the company’s annualised revenue at approximately $148 million as of mid-2025, against an internal target of $656 million by end-2026, a figure that would require roughly 230% growth.
Personal Computer and Computer for Enterprise are the products Perplexity is counting on to close that gap.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.