Technology User Experience

From Browser to AI Agent: Edge, Chrome, and What Comet Changes

Most people are using ChatGPT or Gemini the long way — copying text, switching tabs, pasting it in, waiting for a response, then going back. Every single time. That’s not a workflow.

Here’s the thing: your browser has had AI built into it for a while now. Sitting right there. Waiting. And if you aren’t using it, you’re leaving a serious amount of time on the table every day.

In my latest YouTube video — which you can watch here — I walk through exactly how to use Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome as proper AI-powered work companions. Practical. No fluff. I want to add some context to what I covered, because there’s a lot more to unpack.

The Tab-Switching Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s what a typical “AI-assisted” workday actually looks like for most people: you’re reading a long brief, a client email, or a report. You need to summarise it. So you select everything, copy it, open a new tab, paste it into ChatGPT, wait, read the response, then go back to what you were doing.

That’s five steps for something that should take one.

The cognitive load of context-switching is real. Research from the University of California, Irvine found that it takes an average of over 23 minutes to regain full focus after an interruption. Every unnecessary tab switch adds up. By the end of the day, your focus has been fragmented across dozens of micro-interruptions — and you wonder why you’re tired but feel like you didn’t get much done.

The fix is already in your browser.

What Edge Copilot and Chrome’s Gemini Actually Do

Both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome now have AI assistants built directly into the sidebar. No extension. No extra subscription (at least for Edge). No new tab. The AI opens right alongside whatever you’re reading or working on.

Microsoft Edge Copilot is powered by Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI. Open any page, hit the Copilot icon in the top-right corner, and you’ve got an AI that can see the page you’re on and answer questions about it. Summarise this article. Extract the key action items from this report. Draft a reply to this email in a more formal tone. It does it all without you touching another tab.

Chrome’s Gemini AI (the side panel) works the same way. Google has been pushing this hard through its integration with Workspace. If you’re in Gmail, Docs, or just browsing, the AI sidebar is available to help you write, research, or think through a problem — right next to what you’re actually working on.

I walked through real use cases for both in the video. The honest takeaway is this: once you start using these properly, going back feels like using a flip phone. The setup is minimal. The payoff is immediate.

Real Use Cases — Not Hypothetical Ones

I’ve worked with clients across retail, energy, and financial services. One pattern I keep seeing: people adopt AI tools in isolation, then wonder why their day doesn’t feel any more efficient. The browser assistant changes that because it removes the activation cost of going to the tool.

Here’s what I actually use it for — and what I showed in the video:

  1. Summarising long pages or PDFs — read a 40-page document in four minutes. Ask what the key decisions are, what the risks are, or what section is most relevant to a brief.
  2. Drafting responses in context — highlight an email or a thread, ask the AI to draft a response with specific tone or intent, without leaving the page.
  3. Research on the fly — reading a competitor’s site and want to benchmark it against yours? Ask the AI directly. It’s faster than opening a new tab and typing a query from scratch.
  4. Rewriting content — paste a clunky paragraph from a brief you need to respond to, ask for a cleaner version, done.
  5. Getting quick explanations — reading something technical or unfamiliar? Instead of Googling it and ending up three tabs deep, ask the sidebar.
  6. Content production — create images, music, infographics and more, almost instantaneously.

This is not about doing extraordinary things. It’s about doing ordinary things faster and without breaking your concentration.

Then There’s Comet — The Truly Agentic Browser

Edge Copilot and Chrome’s Gemini are smart assistants. They respond when you ask. That’s step one.

Perplexity’s Comet browser is something else. It’s not an assistant that waits for your input — it’s an agent that can act on your behalf. The difference matters.

An AI assistant helps you do things. An AI agent does things for you.

Comet can browse multiple pages autonomously, extract information across sites, fill in forms, complete multi-step tasks, and put together research or outputs without you initiating every single step. You give it a goal. It figures out the steps. That’s genuinely agentic browsing — and it’s been available for free since Perplexity opened it up in late 2025, after it launched at $200/month.

Edge and Chrome are table stakes — you should be using them now. Comet is where you see what’s actually possible when AI stops being a tool in your browser and starts being a co-worker inside it.

Worth noting: in January 2026, Amazon filed the first legal action against Comet’s automated shopping capabilities. Whether that limits some functionality going forward is something to watch. But the core agentic browsing model is here to stay — every major browser is moving in this direction.

“The browser used to be a window to the internet. Now it’s becoming a bridge between you and what the internet can do for you.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Microsoft Edge Copilot free to use? Yes, the base version of Edge Copilot is free and available directly through the Microsoft Edge browser. You don’t need a Microsoft 365 subscription to use the AI sidebar for basic tasks like summarising pages and drafting text. Some advanced features tie into Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is a paid product.

Does Chrome’s AI assistant require a Google account? You’ll need to be signed into Chrome and have the Gemini side panel enabled. The basic features work within Google Workspace apps and while browsing. Some enhanced features are part of Google One AI Premium.

What makes Comet different from Edge or Chrome AI? Edge and Chrome AI assistants respond to your prompts while you’re on a specific page. Comet is a fully agentic browser — meaning it can navigate the web, complete multi-step tasks, and take actions across multiple sites autonomously, without you driving each step. It’s a fundamentally different model.

Do I need to be technical to set this up? Not at all. In my video I walk through the setup step by step — it’s a few clicks to get started. The learning curve is mostly about trusting the tool and finding the workflows where it saves you the most time.

The Bottom Line

You don’t need a new subscription or a new tool. What you need is to stop treating your browser like a dumb window and start treating it like a working partner.

If you want to go further — whether it’s implementing AI into your actual business workflows then reach out and I’d be happy to help.