Perplexity’s agentic head bets AI agents will replace outsourcing

Perplexity head of AI agent infrastructure Minh Pham / Photo credit: Minh Pham

Minh Pham, a Vietnamese engineer who sold his startup Invisible to Perplexity AI in August for an undisclosed amount, says the future of AI agents will depend on orchestrating many models to work together, rather than relying on a single agent. 

The deal marked a pivot for Invisible, which had focused on enterprise automation. Its main product prior to the acquisition, A3, converted human-written playbooks into workflows that can be executed by AI agents, and it attracted clients in industries such as insurance and mortgages. 

Pham said Invisible had priced its agentic workforce at about the equivalent of US$10 an hour, with the ability to scale a firm’s operations instantly. He predicted that the cost of an AI agent could fall to US$1 an hour within two years and as low as 10 cents in the future, making the technology a direct competitor to outsourcing.

The engineer’s conviction in multi-agent systems stems from his earlier work at CloudKitchens, a delivery-only kitchen startup founded by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. 

As its infrastructure lead, Pham said one of the biggest challenges for restaurants was managing orders from multiple food delivery platforms, often across a jumble of tablets. His team built software that aggregated all orders into a single system, which scaled globally.

That experience shaped the foundation of Invisible. Pham realized the same principle could be applied more broadly: build an agent once, deploy it on any website, and automate repetitive workflows across thousands of platforms. 

At CloudKitchens, this meant agents could fetch orders from delivery sites and send them directly to restaurants. Beyond food, the same technology could automate tasks like applying for loans or processing insurance claims.

“The technology is so much bigger than CloudKitchens itself,” Pham said.

US-based Perplexity recently grabbed headlines with its US$34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome. Its new Comet browser is also making waves, where users can let AI agents do all tasks without leaving the browser. 

Pham, now the head of AI agent infrastructure at Perplexity, declined to share specifics of his team’s work. But he said the aim is to make the company’s agents more reliable in handling multistep tasks.

See also: AI talent war pushes US firms to Asia’s outsourced coders