Perplexity Assistant: The AI search engine also releases an AI agent

All major AI providers are working on AI agents. In addition to OpenAI, Perplexity has also released one and calls it Perplexity Assistant. According to Perplexity in a post on X, it should be able to reserve a table for you in a restaurant, for example. It wasn't long ago that OpenAI was trumpeting that plug-ins would be able to reserve a table in a restaurant. These were to become the big competition to the usual app stores. The plug-ins were replaced by so-called GPTs – now come the AI agents.

Of course, the new AI agents act completely differently. At the very least, they should be better at reasoning. This is the ability of AI models to think logically or draw conclusions. This is usually done by means of reinforcement learning, i.e. learning through rewards. The Perplexity Assistant should also be able to write emails, book rides and set up reminders for appointments. Unlike with plug-ins or GPTs, you don't have to select an extension, but remain in the Assistant app. So if you want to book an Uber, Uber itself does not have to offer an extension because the Assistant acts like a human and can use the Uber app independently. In fact, you should make the final selection yourself at the latest when you have to pay for something. Furthermore, Perplexity Assistant does not work for all services –, as interfaces are obviously missing.

The assistant can also answer questions, naturally with an AI search engine. However, because the underlying model is multimodal, it is also possible to ask questions about what can be seen on the screen – potentially this can also be done using a camera. Perplexity Assistant is initially available in the Google Play Store; it is not yet available for iOS. The AI agent is free of charge. The situation is different with OpenAI's Operator, which has also just been released. This AI agent costs 200 US dollars per month and is integrated into ChatGPT.

AI agents everywhere you look

The AI assistant from Google called Gemini always runs on Android devices. It also runs natively on the new Galaxy S25 devices from Samsung –. This means that many people will automatically have an assistant in their smartphones without having to install an app from Perplexity or OpenAI. This is an advantage that Google's search engine has already used on smartphones or Microsoft's Teams, because many people have already used Outlook.

However, AI agents can also take on special tasks, for example at work. Salesforce offers AI agents for customer contact, among other things. They can respond to customer problems and also act in a predefined field. Microsoft and Zoom both offer AI agents for their communication environments. Microsoft Copilot and AI Companion can, for example, automatically summarize meetings, create appointments and tasks and more.

(emw)