Stop Opening a New Tab

Occasional AI use stays occasional when the assistant lives in a separate tab. Switch on the one already built into your inbox, your docs, and your browser.

Put the AI where the work already happens, and close the chatbot tab. If the assistant lives in its own browser tab, you have to remember to go get it, and most days you won't. Occasional use stays occasional when the tool is somewhere else.

You can see it at the company level. The Census Bureau's working paper on AI diffusion found that 65% of the firms using AI limit it to three or fewer tasks. In most of those companies AI got a tab, a login, and a pilot, and it never got a seat at the desk where the work happens. The same thing happens to you. You'll use a tool every day when it's one click from the thing you're doing, and once a week when it's a window switch away.

Odds are you're already paying for the in-the-flow version and haven't switched it on. If your company runs on Google Workspace, Gemini sits in a side panel in Gmail and Docs: summarize the thread you're staring at, draft the reply in the reply box, rewrite the paragraph inside the doc. On Microsoft 365, Copilot lives in Word and in Outlook, same idea: it drafts from the blank page you already have open and catches you up on the thread you got cc'd on. And Claude now runs as a side panel in Chrome on paid plans, reading whatever page you're on, whether that's the CRM record, the support ticket, or the vendor portal. If your company is on a Claude Team or Enterprise plan, you can also tag it in a thread in Slack instead of leaving Slack to go ask it something.

Here's the move. Pick the one place you spend the most hours, probably the inbox or the document editor, and switch on the AI that's built into it. Then, for the rest of the week, don't open the chatbot tab for anything you could do right there. Summarize the thread in the thread. Draft the memo in the memo. Ask about the account while you're looking at the account. The answers tend to be better, too, because the assistant can see the thing you're working on instead of the version you pasted in.

I've caught myself doing the tab dance plenty. Copy the email, switch tabs, paste, ask, copy the answer, switch back. Every one of those steps is a place to give up, and on a busy afternoon I do. Take the steps away and the tool gets used.

Switch one on today, then hit reply and tell me which one it was. I'm curious whether the inbox or the doc wins.

Your AI Sherpa,