OpenAI announced app integrations this week and my LinkedIn feed filled up with people ordering burritos through ChatGPT. DoorDash, Spotify, Uber, a handful of others. You can now sit inside a ChatGPT conversation and hail a ride or queue up a playlist without leaving the chat window. Genuinely cool demo.

But I spent about fifteen minutes playing with the Spotify integration and then went back to my actual work, which involved reading a long vendor proposal in my browser, and the disconnect hit me immediately. ChatGPT can talk to Spotify’s API and add songs to a playlist on my behalf, but it cannot read the three paragraphs of pricing terms I’m staring at right now in Chrome. It has no idea what tab I have open.

The API problem vs. the tab problem

App integrations solve a real thing. Before this week, if you wanted ChatGPT to interact with DoorDash, you had to copy a menu URL, paste it in, describe what you wanted, then go place the order yourself anyway. Now the model calls DoorDash’s API directly, which is a meaningful reduction in friction for that specific task.

And I do not want to dismiss this because the engineering is legitimately impressive, requiring OAuth flows, structured tool calls, and a plugin architecture that handles failures gracefully across dozens of third-party services simultaneously. OpenAI clearly put serious work into making this reliable.

But most knowledge work does not happen inside apps that have ChatGPT integrations. It happens in browser tabs. Google Sheets, Jira, Salesforce, internal dashboards, email threads, PDFs opened in-browser, random web apps that your company built five years ago and nobody documented. None of these have ChatGPT integrations, and most of them never will because the long tail of web applications is essentially infinite and no integration marketplace can cover it.

So when someone says “ChatGPT can now take actions in other apps,” the asterisk is that those apps need to have built and maintained an official integration. Your company’s internal timesheet tool did not make the list.

What 900 million users actually do all day

I wrote about this when ChatGPT hit 900 million weekly users. The usage pattern that dominates is still the same one from 2023: open ChatGPT in a tab, describe what you’re looking at in another tab, get a response, copy it back. The integrations announcement does not change this for the vast majority of work tasks because those tasks live in the browser, not in DoorDash.

Sam Altman has talked publicly about ChatGPT becoming an “operating system for AI.” But operating systems are useful because they sit between you and everything, not between you and twelve partner apps. The browser is the actual operating system for most people’s work in 2026, and ChatGPT still cannot see into it.

A chrome extension that just reads the page

Dassi takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of building API integrations with specific apps one by one, it lives inside Chrome and reads whatever page you happen to be on. Vendor proposal, spreadsheet, LinkedIn thread, that weird internal dashboard. It does not need the app to have an integration because it is not calling an API. It is reading the DOM, same as you read the screen.

I’ve been using GPT-5.2 through dassi for a couple weeks now and the difference from chatgpt.com is not about model quality, which is identical, but about whether the model knows what I’m working on without me having to explain it through a crap copy-paste relay. I talked about this more in GPT-5.2 Is Incredible. You’re Running It in the Wrong Place. and my thinking hasn’t changed since.

Integrations will keep shipping

OpenAI will add more partners. Probably hundreds eventually. And some of them will be useful in the way that the Spotify one is kind of fun for fifteen minutes. But the browser problem is not a problem you solve by signing enough partnership deals, because the number of web pages and web apps that a knowledge worker touches in a given week is always going to outrun the number of integrations any company can maintain.

The simpler fix is an AI that sits in the browser and just looks at whatever you’re looking at. No partnerships required. No waiting for your company’s tools to show up in some integration marketplace. You open a page, the AI sees it, and you get on with your day.