By Asif Razzaq
Publication Date: 2026-06-09 05:53:00
A new working research from Perplexity and Harvard offers field evidence on what AI agents do to knowledge work. It draws on production data from two Perplexity products: Search and Computer.
The setup is a natural comparison. Search is a conversational answer engine. Computer is an agent that plans and executes tasks end to end. The same users touch both products, so the team can hold the task roughly constant.
What the Study Actually Measures
The research study covers a 90-day window, February 27 through May 27, 2026. Computer launched two days before that window opened.
The core method matches near-identical query pairs across the two products. The research team found 10,000 session pairs with cosine similarity above 0.99. Each pair is effectively the same task attempted both ways.
Computer pairs are gated to sessions that invoke an execution tool. These ‘do’ tools include code execution, browser actions, file writes, and connector calls. That gate ensures every Computer session does real autonomous work.
Adoption rose over the window. Cumulative Computer queries reached 84× their first-week total. A matched analysis found Computer adoption also raised users’ daily Search queries by 1.05. The positive effect points to complementarity, not substitution.
The Cost-Structure Framework
The research grounds its data in a simple task-based model. Each…
