The AI you won't have to open

Last month I had to compare three software vendors before a meeting. You probably know the routine. Fifteen tabs. Pricing pages that hide the price. A spreadsheet where I copy and paste the same five facts from each site, then lose track of which tab was which.

This time I tried something different. I opened an AI browser and typed one request: "Open these three vendors, find their pricing for a team of twenty, check whether each one supports single sign-on, and put it all in a table."

Then I watched it do the clicking. It opened the pages, found the plans, noted the limits, and handed me a table. I still checked every number. But the boring hour turned into ten minutes, and I spent the rest of that time thinking about which vendor actually fit.

That moment changed how I think about where AI is going.

Where we are today

Today's AI tools are genuinely smart. They write, analyze, summarize, and code. But they're still narrow. They need us to give them direction, context, and judgment. And we have to go to them: open the app, type the prompt, copy the answer back into our work.

AI today is something you pull out when you need it.

You may have heard of AGI, artificial general intelligence: AI that can handle almost any intellectual task the way a person can. Nobody knows when, or exactly how, that arrives. I don't spend much time guessing. I'm more interested in a shift that's already starting.

From a tool you open to a helper that's there

Two things are changing at the same time.

AI is learning to act, not just advise. Browser assistants like Dia and Comet can already navigate websites, gather information, and finish multi-step tasks for you. It's an early taste of what people call agentic AI: AI that does, not only AI that suggests.

AI is moving closer to us. Smart glasses like Meta's Ray-Ban glasses can already see what you see and answer questions hands-free. Today they're a novelty for many people. Soon they'll feel normal.

Put those together and you get my bet for the real shift: wearable plus agentic. AI that's already present, aware of your context, and ready to help before you think to ask. Today you type prompts. Tomorrow you might just look at a problem and talk.

Why the habits matter more, not less

It's tempting to think that when AI gets that good, the skills won't matter. I think it's the opposite.

An assistant that acts on your behalf is only as good as your direction. You'll still need to give it the right context, check its reasoning, and push back when it's wrong. Those are exactly the habits from this series: think with AI, not just faster, brief it properly, and make it a sparring partner.

And when an agent can click buttons for you, being careful with data matters even more.

Don't wait for the future

You don't need smart glasses or AGI to start. The people who will thrive when AI is everywhere are the ones learning to work with it today, with the tools already on their laptop.

Pick one boring, multi-step task this week. Try handing it to an AI browser. Check the result.

When the future shows up, you'll already know how to work with it.