A study circulating since June 8, 2026, authored by Jeremy Yang of Harvard University alongside Kate Zyskowski, Noah Yonack and Jerry Ma, all of Perplexity, reports that an AI agent performs roughly fifty times more work per session than a chatbot. The paper, a non-peer-reviewed preprint posted to arXiv on June 5, 2026 under identifier 2606.07489, compares Perplexity's answer engine, Perplexity Search, against its autonomous agent, Perplexity Computer, released on February 25, 2026. The study found that a Computer session ran 26 minutes of autonomous work against 33 seconds for a Search session, a 48-fold gap, and on matched tasks, the agent cut average completion time from 269 minutes to 36, translating into an 87 percent reduction in time and a 94 percent reduction in cost. The authors matched near-identical opening queries from 8,357 individuals, drawing 10,000 pairs with a cosine similarity above 0.99. Three of the four authors work for Perplexity, which supplied the data, and no competing product appears in the analysis.