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.
