I read the job-posting analysis that hit the Hacker News front page this week, the one arguing that AI automation is finally visible in hiring data, and my first reaction was recognition more than dread. The roles shrinking first are admin assistants, data entry clerks, schedulers and support ops coordinators. Anyone who has done one of those jobs knows where the hours go.

They go into tabs.

A scheduler’s day is a calendar portal, a booking system and three email threads. A support ops coordinator lives in a helpdesk, a billing admin panel, and whatever internal tool the last engineer built before leaving. So when people say automation is coming for this work, I think the useful question is how. Nearly all of it happens inside browser sessions you’re already logged into, and that one detail decides which tools can reach it at all.

Where does AI automation actually land?

Mostly not on APIs. Some of these tools have one. Plenty don’t, and the ones that do often lock it behind an enterprise tier, an admin approval and an IT ticket that nobody will ever file on behalf of a clerk’s Tuesday routine.

So a Zapier-style workflow can’t reach it, because there’s no connector to plug in. And a cloud agent that boots a fresh Chrome in a datacenter arrives at the login page as a total stranger, without your SSO session, without the “trust this device” cookie you set eight months ago, and usually from an IP address the portal’s bot detection already dislikes. I went into that gap in Cloud Browser Agents Can’t See Your Tabs.

An agent running in your own Chrome skips all of that. It just uses the session you already have.

Three chores, lifted straight from the listings

These three keep showing up in the descriptions of the roles that are drying up. I’ll walk through each one roughly the way it runs with dassi in the Chrome side panel, using only the logins already sitting in the browser.

The first is moving CRM entries between systems. Open the source CRM filtered to what you need, say every deal marked closed-won this week, and put the destination system in the next tab. Then give a plain instruction: “For each deal in this list, create a customer record in the other tab with company name, billing contact and contract value. Skip anything without a billing address and list those for me at the end.” The skip-and-report part matters more than it looks. Bad data moved fast is worse than good data moved slowly.

Second, vendor portal forms. Supplier onboarding, quarterly compliance attestations, certificate-of-insurance uploads. It’s the same fifteen fields every quarter, in a portal that times out if you get up for coffee. Keep the source details in a doc in another tab, ask the agent to fill the portal from it, and tell it to stop before the submit button.

Third, report exports. This one is pure clicking: pick the date range, set four filters, hit export, wait, download. Carrier dashboards, payroll portals and ad accounts all work this way. And when the export button sits behind a pricier plan, the agent can often read the table straight off the screen.

MFA, CAPTCHAs, and the button I won’t let it press

It breaks in predictable places. MFA is the first, although it bites less than you’d expect: the agent is working inside a session that’s already authenticated, so the code-from-your-phone prompt only shows up when that session expires or a portal wants step-up verification for something sensitive, and at that point the agent pauses and you type the six digits yourself. CAPTCHAs come second. Your own Chrome on your own connection trips far fewer of them than a datacenter browser does, but they still appear, and I don’t want an agent solving them (a tool that beats CAPTCHAs is a tool I wouldn’t trust with my accounts). So you click the traffic lights and hand it back. The third matters most. Anything that moves money, signs an attestation, approves a purchase order or sends something to a customer in your name gets a human click every time, and I’d hold that line even if the models were perfect, because the person whose name is on the form is the one who answers for it. The agent fills. You submit. It’s a boring rule, and it’s the one I’d defend hardest.

Four minutes is fine

None of this has to be fast. An agent taking four minutes to move twenty records while you drink coffee beats you doing it in twelve while quietly resenting your job.

Handing off is the part that sticks

Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth has been pushing companies to spend their AI productivity gains instead of banking them. I keep thinking about that next to these listings. Fewer postings doesn’t mean the work disappeared. Somebody still has to know which CRM fields matter, which vendor portal lies about its required fields, and which report finance actually reads versus the one they ask for.

That knowledge was always the job. The clicking was just where it got spent.

So the skill I’d hang onto is delegation: writing the instruction clearly, saying where to stop, catching the one record out of forty that came through mangled. I don’t know yet how hiring managers will phrase that in a posting. “Proficient at supervising software that occasionally invents a zip code” doesn’t have much of a ring to it.

If you want to try it on your own portals, dassi is free on the Chrome Web Store and works with a ChatGPT login or your own API key. Start with the export you dread most. It’s probably the damn payroll one.