A 2022 Harvard Business Review piece by Rohan Narayana Murty stuck with me, and I keep coming back to it now that everyone has an AI tab open. His team measured how often knowledge workers switch between applications. The number was about 1,200 times a day. Roughly four hours a week lost to reorienting yourself after each toggle.

That study predates ChatGPT being a fixture on everyone’s second monitor. So I’d bet the real number is worse now. Because the AI workflow most people actually run isn’t “ask the AI.” It’s copy, switch tab, paste, read, copy the answer, switch back, paste again.

Where the time actually goes

Nobody bills for this. There’s no line item on a timesheet that says “moved text between two windows for eleven minutes.” But it’s the dominant cost of using AI at work, and it’s invisible because each instance is tiny.

You’re reading a customer email. You want help drafting a reply. So you select the email, copy it, flip to chatgpt.com, paste, type your instructions, wait, copy the draft, flip back to Gmail, paste, fix the formatting that got mangled, then delete the part where the model invented a meeting that never happened.

Do that thirty times a day and you’ve trained yourself into a clipboard relay race. The model is brilliant. The plumbing connecting it to your actual work is a garden hose with a kink in it.

The clipboard is a terrible API

Here’s a small one that drives me up the wall: paste a table from a web app into a chat window and watch it dissolve into a wall of unaligned text. Columns gone. Now the AI is guessing at structure you could see perfectly fine two seconds ago, and you’re babysitting its guesses.

The clipboard strips context. It carries the words but not the page they lived on — not the thread above the email, not the other rows in the table, not the fact that you’re logged into this specific account looking at this specific record. You become the integration layer. You are the cable. Every paste is you manually re-explaining a thing the AI could have just looked at, if it had been allowed to look at all.

And this is the part that gets glossed over in every “AI will 10x your productivity” thread. The model isn’t the bottleneck anymore. You are, because you’re the one ferrying data across a tab boundary that shouldn’t exist.

A weird thing happens when the AI is already in the tab

So the obvious fix is to stop moving the text. Put the AI where the work already is.

This is the whole reason browser agents exist. A Chrome extension like Dassi runs in a side panel next to the page you’re already on. It reads the email you’re looking at without you copying anything. It drafts the reply in Gmail’s actual compose box. The table stays a table because the agent sees the rendered page, not a clipboard smear of it. I wrote more about the specific case of LinkedIn and outreach in How to Use AI in LinkedIn Without Copy-Pasting, and the pattern generalizes to basically everything you do in a tab.

The shift sounds small. It is not small. Removing the copy-paste loop doesn’t just save the seconds of pasting — it removes the context-switch tax that HBR was measuring, the four hours a week of mentally re-anchoring every time you cross a window boundary, because you never cross one.

”Just use the API” misses the point

Someone always says this. Wire up the OpenAI API, build an integration, automate the whole pipeline. Sure, if you’re an engineer with a free afternoon and the relevant service actually has an API worth using.

Most knowledge workers are not going to do that, and most of the apps they live in either have no usable API or hide it behind an enterprise tier. The browser is the universal interface that every one of those tools already exposes. Your already-logged-in tab is the integration. That’s why I keep coming back to running the model where you sit rather than routing your day through a chat box on someone else’s domain — a point I’ve made before in The Real AI Productivity Trap Is the Context Tax.

The tax you stop paying

Dassi is free, it lives in the browser, and your data stays in the tab instead of taking a field trip through a clipboard and a third-party chat window. You can log in with your existing ChatGPT subscription or bring your own key for Claude, Gemini, whatever. It’s on the Chrome Web Store.

I don’t think the next productivity unlock is a smarter model. We’ve got plenty of smart models. The unlock is killing the dumb little hop between the page and the AI, the one you do so often you stopped noticing you were doing it. Count your copies tomorrow. The number will annoy you.