Perplexity just gave you a 50-person specialist team (for $200 a month)
One click. Pre-built tasks. Real work. Plus a free trick that gets you most of the way there for zero dollars.
Here’s the stat that should stop you cold.
This week, Perplexity rolled out something called Workflows. More than 50 of them, with new ones being added regularly. Each one is a pre-built task tuned by an expert. Market research. Document review. Website builder. SEO keyword research.
You click one. You answer a couple of questions. It does the work.
Translation: Perplexity just turned itself into a marketing analyst, a paralegal, a web developer, and an SEO specialist. All in the same browser tab.
The catch? Workflows live inside a product called Perplexity Computer, and Perplexity Computer sits behind their top-tier Max plan at $200 a month. Not pocket change. But there’s also a free version of this idea that gets you most of the way there, and I’ll show you both.
Word of the Day: Workflow
A Workflow is a pre-built, repeatable AI task that an expert has already designed for you, so all you have to do is click it and answer a couple of questions.
Think of it like a Keurig coffee pod. Someone else figured out the right beans, the right grind, the right water temperature. You don’t need to know any of that. You just pop in the pod and press the button.
For your business, this matters because the hardest part of using AI has never been the AI. It’s been figuring out what to ask it and how to ask it. Workflows skip that step. The expert is baked in.
What Perplexity actually shipped
Perplexity has a product called Perplexity Computer. It is exactly what it sounds like, an AI that can do research and complete tasks like a coworker with a laptop.
This week, they added Workflows on top of it. Here are a few of the ones they highlighted:
Market Research. Analyzes trends, competitors, and opportunities in any market.
Final Pass. Reviews any document to a high standard before it goes out the door.
Website Builder. Builds a complete website from a description, ready to launch.
SEO Keyword Research. Finds high-impact keywords and content gaps for your site.
That’s four. There are more than 50.
So when you see Workflows in the marketing, know that the full experience sits at $200 a month. Pro users can pay-as-you-go for Computer credits if they want to dip their toes in. Free users cannot.
That’s a real number, and you should weigh it against what one of those workflows would actually save you. If a Final Pass review catches a typo on a $50,000 proposal, the math is easy. If you’re using it to plan a birthday party, the math is not.
The free version that gets you most of the way
Here’s the part I love. The Rundown newsletter ran a tutorial yesterday for a free workaround that’s almost as good for one specific job: stress testing a business idea.
It uses Perplexity’s Deep Research mode, which works on the free plan with 3 to 5 runs per day depending on the source.
The recipe is dead simple:
Go to perplexity.ai and sign in (free account is fine).
Switch to Deep Research mode in the chat.
Paste a prompt that says: “Stress test this business idea: [your idea]. Research the market, the competition, the realistic costs, and the biggest risks. Give me a slide deck of findings.”
Hit run and walk away for 5 to 6 minutes.
Read the deck.
I tried this on a side project I’ve been kicking around. The deck wasn’t perfect. But it surfaced two competitors I hadn’t heard of and one risk I hadn’t considered. That’s worth a Saturday morning of your life.
Save the prompt somewhere you’ll actually use it again. Run one idea every weekend. You’ll burn through a year of half-evaluated ideas in a month.
Why this matters more than it seems
Step back for a second. Here’s what’s actually happening.
Six months ago, AI was a chat window. You typed, it answered, you copied the answer somewhere useful. You were doing 80% of the work.
Now AI is a coworker. With workflows. With its own computer. With pre-built specialists you can call on.
I caught a related move buried in the FutureTools newsletter yesterday: Amazon launched Amazon Quick, a $20-a-month desktop AI assistant. Microsoft and OpenAI reset their alliance. Google added Gemini to cars. Mistral debuted remote cloud agents called Vibe.
Everybody is building the same thing. AI that works on your behalf, not just AI that talks to you.
The honest part
I want to be straight with you. The marketing for these tools is always ahead of the reality.
Workflows are real and useful. They are not magic. The Market Research workflow will give you a competitor list that’s about 80% right and 20% hallucinated. The Website Builder will build something fast and ugly. The Final Pass document review will catch real issues, and also flag things that aren’t actually issues.
So the rule still applies. AI gives you a draft. You give it judgment. The draft just used to take you four hours and now takes four minutes.
That’s the whole shift. You’re not being replaced by AI. You’re being upgraded from the person who does the work to the person who reviews and approves it.
The Bottom Line
Here’s what this means for you.
The job description for a small business owner is changing in real time. You used to need to know how to do the work, or you needed to hire someone who did. Now you need to know how to direct the work and how to spot when it’s wrong.
Don’t pay $200 a month until you know you’ll use it. Test the free version on something real. If you find yourself running it five times a week, then upgrade. If you don’t, you just got a year of business research for zero dollars.
Is the work going to be perfect? No. Will it save you hours? Almost certainly. Will it change what you can build alone, with no team, no budget, no permission? Yes. That’s the part nobody is shouting from the rooftops, and that’s the part you don’t want to miss.
SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.