Perplexity AI for Business: From Free Search to Research Assistant

Perplexity isn’t just another AI tool — it’s quickly becoming a business research assistant for leaders who need clear answers fast. In this Dumb Monkey Podcast deep dive, Aamir Qutub explains the Perplexity Ladder: how the Free, Pro, Enterprise, and Max (Comet) versions each unlock new capabilities for business.

From simple searches to deep research, dashboards, and privacy controls, we explore how executives and professionals can decide which level makes sense for them. 

More importantly, we cover the real-world use cases: competitor analysis, market research, customer insights, and even building live dashboards. If you’ve ever wondered whether Perplexity can replace Google or complement ChatGPT in your workflow, this episode gives you the clarity you need.

Transcript

00:00:04:03 - 00:00:23:23 

Aamir 

This is a man who got up from the Dumb Monkey Show, and we had an insightful and 

interesting conversation with Raymond Rodriguez, and Raymond threw a lot of golden 

nuggets out there. He talked about some tools that is actually making his life more 

productive and more efficient. And one of the tools that stood out to me was perplexity. 

00:00:24:00 - 00:00:43:24 

Ramon 

Something that I was using on the way here today with perplexity. Right. And while 

driving, if anyone's used the perplexity voice mode, it's absolutely amazing. I just turned 

it on one day. I'm thinking it's probably not going to be any good. He'll probably just give 

me great side headed up to date information, but it literally seems like seem to be 

integrated within iOS. 

00:00:43:24 - 00:01:04:04 

Ramon 

So before you know it, it's doing emails from me creating drafts. Tell me what's on my 

calendar. It's such a super charge, like executive assistant. No offense, Versary, but he's 

so, so cool. Like, I'm driving on the freeway and it's telling me, you know, these are my 

five meetings today. These are the three projects that the decision makers in the 

meeting, meetings are working on. 

00:01:04:04 - 00:01:10:19 

Ramon 

And this is what you should probably, be steering the conversation towards, like, has to 

is so, so helpful right now. 

00:01:10:19 - 00:01:29:22 

Aamir 

I'm a big fan of perplexity two, and I've been using it a lot, and I have tried different 

versions or levels of Perplexity and some of the use cases that Raymond talked about 

actually apply to specific versions. So let's uncover different versions of perplexity and 

what you get with each version, and what you can do with those versions as well. 

00:01:29:24 - 00:01:57:13 

Aamir 

So perplexity started as an AI search tool. So if you take Google and maybe you put the 

GPT, what you get out of it is perplexity. It's, a large language model based tool, so you 

can talk to it in natural language. It can scroll the internet for you and provide you the 

best results. And the results that you get from it are much better than ChatGPT search 

or copilot search, and of course, much better than what you get in Google. 

00:01:57:18 - 00:02:20:16 

Aamir 

So overall, from a search perspective, it's a great tool, but now it is providing more and 

more add ons to make the overall research experience much better. So perplexity is a 

free version and I am going to refer to my screen here. In the free version you get five 

pro searches per day, but you can do more and more searches, but five of them are like 

really deep searches. 

00:02:20:20 - 00:02:46:23 

Aamir 

You can do basic searches, but you cannot upload files over there. And in terms of data 

privacy, it can actually use the data that you are putting in to train its model like any 

other version. So if you are using free version of ChatGPT or Claude, then most likely 

they can use your data to train your model. So if you are not paying for these models, 

you are training these models, however, with perplexity because you are using it similar 

to Google. 

00:02:46:23 - 00:03:10:03 

Aamir 

You are searching for things and Google is actually reading your data and utilizing that. 

So similar to that perplexity is reading the data that you are putting in and utilizing that. 

If you are using a free version now they have a pro model or paid model which costs 

$20 per month for individual users. It's 20 USD and it's 40 USD for the enterprise users. 

00:03:10:05 - 00:03:32:08 

Aamir 

Now, some of the use cases that Raymond was talking about was about deep research, 

where you have the ability to go and look for a data and do more detailed research. So 

that's something that's available with the Pro version that you can ask it to do a research 

on a particular topic, and it can come back to you with a very detailed research. 

00:03:32:10 - 00:03:58:23 

Aamir 

Now, deep research is something that's available in the paid versions of ChatGPT as 

well. And I would argue that the deep research component of ChatGPT is actually the 

best among all of the assistants that I've tried, because it provides you with the most 

comprehensive research. Microsoft Copilot 365 have got their own researcher agent as 

well. That does a decent job with doing that deep research. 

00:03:58:23 - 00:04:29:17 

Aamir 

So if you haven't tried any of these functions, I would definitely encourage you to do that, 

because these deep research agents, and especially the ones with ChatGPT and Copilot, 

can actually look within your files, within your emails, within your meetings, but can also 

look externally and do a very detailed research and provide you with some amazing 

insights that would generally take, consultant 2 or 3 days to do research and put 

together and provide that information to you. 

00:04:29:19 - 00:05:00:23 

Aamir 

Now, another thing that Perplexity Pro version provides is called Perplexity Labs. So 

Perplexity Labs is an experimental AI tool. But what it allows you to do is if you say, can 

you do me a research on this? Or can you build me a list or a dashboard that it can not 

only do a market research, but gather all of that data, converting to charts and actually 

build you a dashboard, a live dashboard that you can share with your clients, shared 

with your team members, and so on. 

00:05:01:00 - 00:05:33:22 

Aamir 

And it doesn't stop at building the dashboards. It can build some basic websites to 

show that research or data, it can build you presentations, documents, and a lot more. 

Now, dashboards is something that ChatGPT and Copilot currently struggle with, and 

that's something that I've tried with Perplexity Labs, and it works out really well. 

However, when it comes to the presentations, I have seen that Microsoft Copilot, 

especially when it's used with PowerPoint, does a much better job than ChatGPT or 

Perplexity Labs. 

00:05:33:24 - 00:05:57:02 

Aamir 

Now another feature that you get with Perplexity Pro is that you can turn on a setting 

that restricts perplexity from using your data for training, and then if you are using the 

perplexity enterprise pro version, then it never collects your data. So your data is safe 

and secure. From that perspective. Then Raymond and I talked about the common 

browser by perplexity. 

00:05:57:02 - 00:06:22:00 

Aamir 

So. Com it is basically an AI enabled browser, which means that AI is integrated within 

the browser. What it means is that you can actually ask the browser to perform certain 

actions on your behalf. You can ask it to go and fill a form, or find specific and specific 

information from a particular website, or from your emails, or post a job to multiple 

portals. 

00:06:22:00 - 00:06:47:01 

Aamir 

And I have, shared a few videos of how I use Comet Browser, so I will definitely 

encourage you to have a look at those. Now. Comet at the moment is on an invite only 

basis, and Raymond was the first person to get an invite. I could not wait to get an invite, 

so I subscribed to perplexity Max version, which is 200 USD per month, and it gives you 

a direct access to the comet browser. 

00:06:47:01 - 00:07:11:17 

Aamir 

And that's the browser that I have been using, and I can confidently say that it has 

changed my browsing experience. And then the final thing that Raymond talked about, 

which I haven't explored myself, is, the perplexity mobile app and the shortcuts by 

perplexity, which means it integrates with your mobile phone, and you can ask perplexity 

to take certain actions on your phone. 

00:07:11:17 - 00:07:28:15 

Aamir 

So it could be about looking into the messages, tweaking settings and things like that. 

And that's something that I have to explore myself and give it a go. If you haven't started 

with the perplexity journey yet, I would definitely encourage you to start with the 

perplexity free version and go up from there and I'll see you in the next episode.