Perplexity is bringing what it calls hybrid agentic inference to its Personal Computer agent, a system that automatically decides which parts of a task should run on a local model on your machine and which parts should be routed to frontier models in the cloud. The company unveiled what it calls the first hybrid local-server inference orchestrator at Computex 2026, demonstrating software that autonomously decides, in real time and mid-task, which AI workloads stay on a user's device and which get routed to frontier models in the cloud.

CEO Aravind Srinivas demonstrated the system onstage alongside Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan during Intel's keynote, using Perplexity's Personal Computer agent to process confidential deal materials. The feature is coming to Perplexity Computer in July, demoed on Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors and currently exclusive to the Windows PC app.

A router that decides where your tokens go

The orchestrator works on a simple division of labor. A compact model runs locally on your device to determine when sensitive data should be kept local, while work that needs a frontier model's full capability runs on the server. Rather than requiring users to manually choose between local and cloud processing, the system makes those decisions automatically for each request.