Hands on with Perplexity Labs: How to use it for market research, data visualizations and more
🧠 Bring research to life with Perplexity Labs. Use cases for product teams. Knowledge Series #77
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According to Perplexity’s CEO, one of the world’s leading investors now uses Perplexity to write their annual memo:
It’s becoming increasingly acceptable to outsource much of our market research and information synthesis to AI - and despite new studies suggesting that this may be to the detriment of our cognitive abilities, it’s a trend that’s set to continue.
Perplexity’s newest feature, Labs, takes these capabilities a step further by allowing users to rely on it not only for text output but also for transforming research into interactive, professional-grade mini apps.
In this Knowledge Series, we’re going to explore how product teams can make use of these new capabilities. You can use Labs to build polished data visualizations, clickable interactive mini apps, storyboards for user segments and more. We’ll cover some of the most practical and powerful things you can build with it.
Coming up:
What is Perplexity Labs? Core features and functionality explained
Practical ways to use it at work for:
Data analysis and visualizations
Strategy and product differentiation
User research analysis
User storyboarding
Understanding technical concepts including headless CMS and AI model comparisons
Prompts and examples to use for your own product
How to augment prompts with your own data
How to manage your Perplexity Labs assets and share your creations with stakeholders and others
What is Perplexity Labs? An overview of the core features
Perplexity Labs is a new feature released earlier this month that combines a bunch of the product’s existing capabilities with new ones to allow users to generate high quality, well-researched output.
As with most things AI-related, there’s been plenty of overblown hype around what it can actually do (you’ve probably seen those videos with titles like “Consulting is dead. Mind blowing new tool from Perplexity destroys jobs in seconds”). It’s not quite as mind blowing as many of these folks would like you to believe, but it’s still a solid tool that product teams can add to their toolkit to build some pretty useful things.
Here’s a snapshot of some of its core capabilities and how it works:
Labs is a new option available on the Perplexity home screen. When you select it, you can prompt it to create a highly detailed piece of research or interactive mini app. The process uses a combination of LLMs, deep web browsing and code execution to generate assets.
It can take anywhere between 5 to 10 minutes to generate your Lab output and this includes: a one page summary using the assets / elements generated by the research, a clickable, interactive mini app, the assets in a downloadable format. The assets can include images, code snippets and charts that you can download and use elsewhere if necessary.
For every Lab creation you’ll also get a dedicated page showing the sources used in the research. This is handy for cross checking information or further research as you might do in a typical Perplexity search.
Practical use cases for product teams
Here’s a snapshot of some of the things we’ll build together in this Knowledge Series using Perplexity Labs:
This includes product strategy / market analysis, data visualization, user segment storyboards and new ways to teach yourself technical concepts by using Perplexity Labs’ ability to build mini apps for you.
Let’s start with the first use case: data analysis and visualizations for dynamic presentations.