🔎 Forget Research! Perplexity Labs BUILDS Business Assets!

Perplexity Labs: The AI Research Assistant That Builds Real Business Assets

You've probably heard about Perplexity Labs, the new agentic workflow feature that has been generating a lot of excitement. Most people who have glanced at it assume it's just a more powerful version of the "Deep Research" mode - a way to get a slightly more detailed report. They are missing the revolutionary potential entirely.

Perplexity Labs is not just an upgraded research tool. It represents a fundamental shift in what we can expect from an AI assistant. It is a complete research-to-creation engine, a system that can go from a simple question to a fully-built, ready-to-use business asset in a matter of minutes.

After spending weeks putting this new tool through its paces with real-world business challenges, I've discovered five game-changing use cases that can transform how you approach everything from prospect research and competitive intelligence to content strategy and go-to-market planning. Today, I'm going to share exactly how you can use Perplexity Labs to achieve a real, measurable business impact. We'll cover the prompting strategies that deliver professional-grade results, the current limitations you absolutely need to be aware of and the strategic thinking required to get the most out of this incredible new capability.

Part 1: Understanding the Perplexity Ecosystem - More Than Just Research

Before we explore the specific use cases, it’s crucial to understand where Labs fits within the broader Perplexity ecosystem. Think of it as a three-tiered system, with each tier designed for a different level of depth.

• Tier 1: Basic Search (The Quick Answer) This is the Perplexity you likely know and use every day. It's perfect for quick, simple queries where you need an immediate, sourced answer. It’s like asking a brilliant librarian for a single fact or a quick definition. It's fast, efficient and great for everyday information gathering.

• Tier 2: Deep Research Mode (The Comprehensive Report) This mode is designed for when you need to go deeper into a complex topic. It performs a more in-depth analysis, consults a wider range of sources and generates a detailed research report. This is like asking that same librarian to gather all the books on a particular subject and write a comprehensive summary for you. It's excellent for understanding a topic but the output is still a static, text-based document.

• Tier 3: Perplexity Labs (The Research-to-Creation Engine) This is the game-changer. Labs takes the powerful research engine of the other two tiers and adds a "building" layer on top of it. It doesn't just give you a report; it uses its research findings to create a tangible, functional and often interactive business asset. This is like asking the librarian to not only research a topic but to then use that research to build a physical model, design a presentation or draft a complete business plan. It is the only tool in the ecosystem that takes you all the way from research to a ready-to-use deliverable.

The Key Insight: When to Use Labs vs. When to Stick with Research

The two modes share the same underlying research engine but their outputs are fundamentally different.

• Use Labs when you need:

  • An interactive dashboard or a functional tool.

  • A professionally designed presentation with charts and graphs.

  • A functional web asset, like a landing page.

  • Any output that requires data visualization combined with research.

• Stick with Deep Research when you only need:

  • A pure research analysis or a literature review.

  • A text-based report or a written summary.

  • The gathering of information without the need for a created asset.

Part 2: Getting Started - Access, Setup and Critical Limitations

Before you jump in, there are a few important prerequisites and limitations to be aware of.

2.1. Prerequisites

• Perplexity Pro Plan: Labs is currently a feature that is only available to Perplexity Pro subscribers.

• Usage Limits: Your Pro plan comes with a limit of 50 Labs queries per month. This means you need to be thoughtful and strategic with your prompts. You can't just experiment endlessly.

• Security Consideration: This is a big one. As of now, there is no way to revoke a shared link to a Labs asset once you have created it. If you create a dashboard with sensitive information and share the link, that link will provide permanent public access to the asset. Plan your sharing strategy very carefully.

2.2. Two Ways to Access Labs

• Method 1: Direct Labs Access. You can click the lightbulb icon in the Perplexity interface to go directly to the Labs environment. You then write a prompt where you specify the research you want it to do and the type of asset you want it to create. Perplexity Labs will then handle both the research and the building process automatically.

• Method 2: The Research-to-Labs Workflow. This is a powerful two-step process. You can start your session in the standard "Deep Research" mode to perform the initial information gathering. Once you are satisfied with the research, you can then switch to Labs mode. The system will maintain the full context from your research phase and use that information to build your asset. This gives you more control over the initial research phase.

2.3. Critical Limitations to Understand

• Iteration Challenges: Unlike some other AI tools where you can have a back-and-forth conversation to refine an artifact, Perplexity Labs treats each significant change as a new request. This means that if you want to alter your dashboard after it has been created, you will often have to run a new query, which will use another one of your precious monthly credits.

• The Security Issue: It is worth repeating: the inability to revoke shared links is a significant security concern. Do not use Perplexity Labs to create assets with private client data, personal financial information or any other sensitive content that you wouldn't be comfortable with being potentially public forever.

Part 3: The 5 Game-Changing Business Use Cases

Now, let's explore the five powerful use cases that can provide real business impact, with detailed breakdowns of how to execute each one.

Use Case 1: The Prospect Research Dashboard

The Traditional Pain Point: For any sales team or agency, prospect research is a soul-crushing, tedious and often fragmented process. A sales development representative (SDR) might spend their entire day juggling expensive database subscriptions like Crunchbase, manually scouring LinkedIn for key contacts, setting up alerts for news articles and trying to piece all this disconnected information together in a messy, hard-to-manage spreadsheet. There's no centralized system, no easy way to prioritize leads and the process is incredibly inefficient.

The Labs Solution: You can use a single, detailed prompt to have Perplexity Labs act as your personal research team, building a comprehensive and interactive prospecting dashboard in minutes.

• Sample Prompt Structure:

I operate a marketing automation agency focused on high-growth DTC e-commerce brands in the fashion and beauty industries. I need you to research potential prospect companies showing strong growth signals, such as new product launches, global market expansion, recent funding or significant leadership changes. Please create an interactive prospect dashboard with a lead scoring system to highlight top opportunities. The dashboard should include detailed company profiles with contact info, a summary of recent growth signals and an industry breakdown. It should be searchable, filterable and feature 20-30 prospects.

What You Get: After about 10 minutes of processing, Labs will generate a professional-grade, interactive dashboard. This isn't just a static list; it's a functional tool that acts as a central hub for your sales team.

Interactive Dashboard Features:

• Summary Metrics: An at-a-glance overview with the total number of prospects found and a chart showing how they are distributed across your lead scoring system (e.g., Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3).

• Searchable Prospect Database: A fully functional table with columns for company details, estimated revenue, employee count and key contacts. You can search for a specific company or filter the list by industry.

• Detailed Company Profiles: You can click on any company in the database to open a detailed profile page. This page will contain links to the news articles, press releases and sources that identify their specific growth indicators, providing valuable context for outreach.

• Data Visualization: The dashboard will include charts showing the geographic distribution of the prospects and their current funding status.

• Outreach Templates: The AI can even generate ready-to-use email outreach templates tailored to the specific growth indicators it found.

The Business Impact:

• Time Savings: This single asset replaces what would normally be 8-15 hours of manual research by an SDR. That's an entire day or two of work, completed in 10 minutes. This frees up your sales team to focus on high-value activities like actual outreach and building relationships.

• Quality and Organization: The quality of the data is comparable to what a human would find but the organization and presentation are far superior. Everything is centralized, prioritized and easy to access.

Pro Tips for Prospect Research:

• Verification Strategy: The data is usually accurate but always double-check important details before reaching out. A good practice is to random-sample 10-15% of the prospects to verify their details.

• Focus on the Mid-Market: The AI tends to find the best and most accurate data for mid-market companies. Data for very large Fortune 500 companies can sometimes be too vast, while data for very small startups may not be publicly available.

• Optimize Your Prompt: Clearly specify the exact industries you want to target. The more specific you are about the growth indicators you care about, the better the results will be.

Use Case 2: The High-Impact, Research-Driven Landing Page

The Traditional Pain Point: Building a landing page that actually converts is incredibly difficult. Most landing page builders give you a beautiful template but they don't help you with the most important part: the messaging. What should your headline be? What features should you highlight? What specific pain points should you address? Answering these questions correctly requires deep market and customer research, which most businesses don't have the time or resources to do properly.

The Labs Solution: Perplexity Labs is uniquely capable of combining deep competitive and customer research with the creation of the landing page itself, resulting in a data-backed asset.

• Sample Prompt Structure:

I’m launching a new email marketing SaaS product aimed at small business owners who run online courses. I need you to research the messaging of my main competitors (such as ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign) by analyzing their websites. Additionally, analyze customer feedback by looking at reviews on platforms like G2, Capterra and Reddit. Using this research, create a professional, one-page landing page with a data-driven headline that addresses the main pain point you identified, an interactive ROI calculator, a feature comparison chart that emphasizes my product’s unique benefits and customer testimonials based on real quotes from your research. The design should be modern, clean and trustworthy, with a blue and white color scheme.

What Makes This Different:

• Research Integration: The AI doesn't just write generic copy. It analyzes real user reviews from across the web to understand the exact words and phrases your target audience uses to describe their problems and desires. It analyzes your competitors' messaging to identify opportunities for you to position your product differently.

• Professional Output: The final landing page isn't just text. It includes interactive elements like an ROI calculator to engage visitors, data-backed testimonials sourced from its research and a competitive positioning that is informed by a deep market analysis.

• Generated Assets: Beyond the landing page itself, the research process generates valuable assets like feature comparison charts, pricing analysis visualizations and even a customer journey map that you can use in other parts of your marketing.

The Business Impact: This process allows you to create a landing page with a message that is almost guaranteed to resonate with your target market, because it is built from their own words and an analysis of what they are already responding to. It takes the guesswork out of copywriting and replaces it with data-driven strategy.

Use Case 3: The Real-Time Social Media Trend Tracker

The Traditional Pain Point: For content creators and social media managers, staying on top of trends is a constant, exhausting struggle. Trends emerge and disappear in a matter of days or even hours. By the time you manually identify a trending topic, create content about it and post it, the trend has often already peaked and you've missed the wave.

The Labs Solution: You can create a live dashboard that acts as your personal content strategy intelligence hub, constantly monitoring the social media landscape for you.

• Sample Prompt: 

Create an AI industry trend tracker that monitors social media discussions from the past 30 days. Research trending topics, conversations and emerging themes related to 'AI tools' and 'startup news' across platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit. Develop an interactive dashboard that displays the top trending topics with engagement metrics, a sentiment analysis of the discussions, a breakdown of which platform is leading the conversation and a section that collects common questions people are asking about these topics

The Outcome: You get a dynamic dashboard that gives you a real-time pulse on your industry.

• Dashboard Components: You can see which topics are gaining momentum, complete with trend momentum indicators (rising, stable or declining). You can see the overall sentiment around these topics. Most importantly, the "question mining" feature extracts the actual questions that real users are asking in forums and on social media, giving you a goldmine of content ideas.

The Business Impact: This transforms your content strategy from being reactive to being proactive. You can identify and jump on trends before they peak, create content that directly answers the specific questions your audience is asking and make data-driven decisions about where to focus your content creation efforts for maximum impact.

Use Case 4: Competitive Intelligence with Brand Sentiment

The Traditional Pain Point: Standard competitive analysis is often a dry, feature-focused exercise. It tells you what your competitors are doing (their features, their pricing) but it doesn't tell you how the market feels about them. This missing layer of emotional context is where the biggest strategic opportunities often lie.

The Labs Solution: Labs can combine traditional product analysis with real-time brand sentiment analysis from social media, forums and review sites.

• Sample Prompt:

Develop a competitive intelligence dashboard for Booking.com, focusing on its main competitors: Expedia and Airbnb. Research and compare their feature sets, pricing models and loyalty programs. Also, track brand sentiment by monitoring social media mentions from the last 60 days. The dashboard should feature a side-by-side comparison of offerings, a brand sentiment score for each company with real examples of both positive and negative mentions and a market share visualization.

The Outcome: You get a rich, multi-layered view of the competitive landscape. You can see not only where you have a feature advantage but also where you have a perception advantage. You might discover that while a competitor has more features, customers are constantly complaining about their hidden fees or their poor customer service. This reveals a powerful opportunity for your marketing message.

The Business Impact: This allows you to build a much more sophisticated competitive strategy. You can position your product not just based on what it does but on how it makes your customers feel. You can craft marketing campaigns that directly target the specific pain points and frustrations that you know are plaguing the customers of your competitors.

Use Case 5: The Go-to-Market Strategy Presentation

The Traditional Pain Point: Creating a comprehensive go-to-market (GTM) strategy deck is a massive undertaking for any startup or new product launch. It can take weeks of research, data analysis, financial modeling and slide design to produce a professional, executive-ready presentation that can be used to secure funding or achieve internal buy-in.

The Labs Solution: You can have Perplexity Labs do almost all of the heavy lifting for you, condensing weeks of work into minutes.

• Sample Prompt:

Develop a go-to-market strategy presentation for a new online learning platform aimed at professionals looking to enhance their AI skills. Research the market size and growth trends, analyze key competitors such as Coursera and Udemy, identify customer pain points and suggest a sales and marketing strategy. Create a 10-slide executive presentation with a professional design, including data visualizations for market sizing, a competitive landscape matrix and a high-level implementation roadmap.

The Outcome: In about 15-20 minutes, Perplexity Labs will deliver a complete, professionally designed PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation.

• Presentation Quality: The output is not just a text document; it’s a polished presentation with charts, graphs and a professional design you’d expect from a top consulting firm. The content is data-driven, with all claims and market size numbers backed by the sources it found during its research phase.

• Strategic Components: The presentation will include all the key elements of a professional GTM strategy, from a market opportunity analysis (including TAM/SAM/SOM breakdowns) and a competitive differentiation matrix to detailed customer personas and a KPI framework for measuring success.

The Business Impact: This is perhaps the most powerful example of the tool's efficiency. It condenses what is normally 2-3 weeks of intense work by a strategy team into a 20-minute, automated process. This allows startups and businesses to be incredibly agile, testing and refining their strategies at a speed that was previously unimaginable.

Part 4: Advanced Prompting Strategies for Professional Results

The secret to unlocking these high-quality outputs is not in the tool itself but in the quality of the instructions you provide. Professional-grade results require an investment in prompt crafting. Here are the techniques that consistently deliver business-ready assets.

4.1. The Three Pillars of a Great Prompt 

Every successful prompt you write for Perplexity Labs should be built on three pillars:

1. Comprehensive Context Setting: Clearly tell the AI its role and describe your business situation.

• Role Definition: Start your prompt by assigning a role to the AI. For example, "You are a senior market research analyst for a venture capital firm," or "You are a co-founder of a new SaaS startup".

• Business Context: Provide specific details about the business, its industry, its target market and its goals.

2. Detailed Output Specification: You must be crystal clear about the deliverable you expect.

• Exact Deliverable Type: Don't just say "make a report". Say "create an interactive dashboard," "generate a 10-slide executive presentation," or "build a one-page landing page".

• Required Functionality: If you want an interactive asset, specify the functionality. For example, "The dashboard must include a searchable table and a filter for industry".

• Design Requirements: Provide guidance on the visual aesthetic. Use phrases like "consulting-grade professional design," "a clean and modern web design," or specify a color scheme.

3. Clear Research Focus: You must guide the AI's research process.

• Time Frame: Be specific about the time frame for the research (e.g., "the last 30 days," "the most recent fiscal quarter").

• Source Preferences: You can guide the AI to look at specific types of sources (e.g., "social media conversations," "G2 and Capterra reviews," "official industry reports").

• Competitor Identification: Name the specific competitors you want it to analyze.

4.2. Quality Control Through Prompting 

You can dramatically improve the quality of the output by including specific quality indicators in your prompt. Instead of just hoping for a good result, demand it. Use phrases like:

• "Create a deliverable with a consulting-grade professional design".

• "The final output should be of executive presentation quality".

• "The dashboard must have full interactive functionality".

• "The landing page should follow modern web design standards".

• "All claims must be supported by data-driven visualizations".

Part 5: Optimization, Best Practices and The Business Impact

5.1. Getting the Maximum Value from Labs

• Strategic Prompt Planning: Before you use one of your valuable monthly credits, spend a few minutes crafting a detailed prompt. The more time you invest in the prompt, the better the output will be.

• Data Verification Workflow: Always fact-check the key data points in any generated asset, especially if you are using it for external purposes.

• Asset Management Strategy: Download all the generated files (code, presentations, data) for offline access and integration with your other tools. And remember the security issue: be extremely strategic about who you share the permanent links with.

5.2. The Business Impact: A Clear ROI 

The time savings from using this tool are not just an efficiency gain; they represent a fundamental shift in business agility.

• Prospect Research: A task that took 8-15 hours can now be done in 10 minutes (a 95%+ time saving).

• Go-to-Market Strategy: A process that took 2-3 weeks can now be completed in 20 minutes (a 98%+ time saving). This allows you to test more ideas, respond to market changes faster and focus your human talent on high-value strategic work rather than low-value data gathering.

Part 6: The Future of Business Intelligence

Perplexity Labs isn't just another AI tool. It represents a significant evolution in how we can use AI for practical business purposes. The seamless integration of comprehensive research with the creation of professional assets eliminates the traditional, time-consuming barrier between analysis and implementation.

The competitive advantage in the coming years will go to the individuals and businesses who can master these new "research-to-creation" workflows. While your competitors are spending weeks gathering data and building decks, you will be able to generate deep market insights and create actionable business assets in a matter of minutes.

The future of business intelligence is already here. The only question is whether you will be leading the transformation or trying to catch up to it.

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