Perplexity's Agent API adds versioned Profiles and Skills

Perplexity added three things to its Agent API: custom Skills, managed connectors in preview, and Profiles. A Profile is the piece that ties them together, storing an agent’s model, instructions, tools, Skills, connectors and run settings under a single versioned ID so a team configures an agent once and reuses it across applications.

The stated problem is mundane and real. Finance teams, for example, want every monthly close and variance analysis to follow the same reconciliation instructions and reporting format, with each application supplying its own data. Previously that meant rebuilding the configuration in every application and storing credentials separately per integration.

Managed connectors let a project administrator configure an approved external integration once and share it, so applications reference the shared connector rather than holding their own credentials and tool definitions. GitHub, Slack, Google Drive, Datadog, Linear and Notion are supported at launch, and developers can still build their own customer connectors for internal systems outside that catalog. Access changes are handled by updating the connection in one place.

Skills are versioned packages of instructions, procedures and supporting files that members invoke from the same project, so a change is published as a new version rather than edited into every application. All three are configured from the API Console and referenced in requests with an API key from the same project. Profiles and custom Skills are available now; managed connectors are the preview item.

This is a configuration layer, not a new capability, and worth sizing accordingly. It follows the same managed runtime launched in March and the unified surface added last month, and its real value is operational: one place for agent setup, one place for credentials, and version history for changes. For anyone already running agents across several internal apps, that is usually the first thing to get painful.

(Original source: Perplexity)