Perplexity's Computer lands in Teams and Excel

Most office work follows the exact same loop: ask a teammate for numbers in chat, paste them into Excel, cross-reference external databases, and format the final deck. Perplexity is trying to swallow that entire loop.

At its inaugural enterprise conference in New York, Ask NYC 2026, Perplexity announced a major wave of enterprise updates for its Computer product. The search company is pushing hard past browser tabs and straight into corporate desktops.

Inside Teams and alongside your spreadsheets

Computer was originally prototyped inside Slack, where coworkers naturally shared prompts in public threads. Now, Perplexity is moving onto Microsoft's home turf.

Computer is now available inside Microsoft Teams, where users can message it directly or pull it into group channels. That gives the tool direct access to Teams' 350 million monthly active users.

For analysts, the bigger news is Computer in Excel, now in beta. Instead of switching back and forth between a web browser and financial models, Computer lives in a native side panel, letting people ask questions and analyze data directly inside the sheet.

Perplexity also launched Workflows, a feature designed for recurring office routines. A workflow bundles the prompt, context, and output format into a single repeatable job. The platform ships with more than 70 prebuilt workflows that can be customized, shared across teams, and scheduled to run asynchronously in the background.

Licensed data and zero-touch credentials

Enterprise AI usually hits a brick wall the moment company data and access keys come into play. Perplexity introduced two partnerships to get around this friction.

First, new native connectors for Snowflake and Databricks let teams query proprietary data in place. That spares staff from moving raw files between tools or waiting days for data engineering tickets.

Second, an identity security integration with 1Password allows Computer agents to act on behalf of an employee without the underlying credentials ever touching the agent or the model. Every action remains logged and auditable.

For dealmakers, Perplexity rolled out Computer for Professional Finance. It bundles data from licensed vendors including Morningstar, PitchBook, Daloopa, and Carbon Arc with no separate subscriptions required. Analysts can generate tearsheets and stock comps where every single number hyperlinks directly back to its source audit trail.

Looking further ahead, Perplexity previewed a Personal Computer concept where multi-model agents run 24/7 on local hardware like a Mac mini, letting workers start an objective on a phone and return to a finished file.

Why it matters

We think this rollout proves that the enterprise AI battle has shifted from baseline model intelligence to desktop distribution.

For analysts and operators, this solves the two biggest headaches with general AI: hallucinations and isolated systems. By piping in licensed datasets from PitchBook and Morningstar alongside internal Snowflake warehouses, Perplexity transforms from a clever search engine into a genuine business tool. The fact that numbers link back to their exact source makes it actually viable for audit-sensitive teams.

Meeting workers where they already sit is the smartest move here. Instead of forcing companies into a new standalone interface, Perplexity is slipping directly into Teams chats and Excel sheets.

However, this playbook carries an obvious risk. Microsoft has its own Copilot embedded across Teams and Excel. Perplexity is essentially setting up shop in Microsoft's backyard, and its long-term survival in those side panels depends heavily on whether platform gatekeepers decide to tolerate the competition.