Tuesdays are 3 AI updates, one hot take, one action. Fridays are 1 practical real estate agent workflow.
I taught a Claude workshop last Wednesday and had all 29 agents fill out a diagnostic before we started. Two answers have been bothering me since. Just under half the room pays for Claude Pro every month, and 44.8% said they had never actually used Claude. Only 27.6% had connected it to Gmail or their Google Drive, and the most common thing stopping everyone was not knowing how to make it fit the way they already work. Which is the exact problem three AI companies spent this week solving in public.
1. Claude’s Chrome sidebar became a full Cowork session, on the same afternoon I was teaching it. On August 12 Anthropic turned the Claude in Chrome side panel into a real Cowork session, so conversations save to your history, your skills and connectors work inside the browser, and a task you start in a tab can be finished later on your phone. The part that matters for you sits in Anthropic’s own announcement: plenty of tools will never build a Claude connector, including internal dashboards and vendor portals, and Claude can work inside those anyway using the logins you already have. That’s the MLS problem solved sideways.
2. OpenAI shut down its browser and moved the whole thing into a Chrome extension. ChatGPT Atlas stopped working on August 9, 292 days after it launched. It never made it off macOS, the promised Windows and mobile builds never shipped, and open tabs and browsing history did not carry over for the people who had built their day around it. OpenAI folded the agent work into a ChatGPT Chrome extension and an upgraded browser mode inside the desktop app.
3. Gemini crossed a billion monthly users, and it never had to ask you to install anything. Google announced the milestone on August 11, calling it the fastest-growing product in the company’s history, with 63% of that use happening by voice. Gemini in Chrome needs no extension because it ships inside the browser your clients already open, with auto browse handling multi-step tasks for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Anthropic and OpenAI both have to convince you to add something.
HOT TAKE
Every AI company tried to build you a new browser, and every one of them quit. In the opposite of that I watched 50 agents connect Claude to their browser last Wednesday. Anything that asks you to go somewhere new loses to whatever is already in front of you. Judge every AI tool you buy this fall by whether it shows up, or can integrate, with something you already use.
1 THING TO TRY
Install Claude in Chrome from the Chrome Web Store, sign in with the account you already pay for, then click the puzzle piece icon in your toolbar and hit the thumbtack next to Claude so it stays pinned. Now open up your MLS back end, and pull up the last ten solds in a farm you work. Ask it this: “Read the results on this page and build me a table with address, sold price, price per square foot, days on market, and concessions. Flag any outlier and tell me what is driving it.” Two things to know going in: this needs a paid Claude plan and it only runs in Chrome. Anthropic says the extension is still risky because a web page can carry hidden instructions, so start on sites you trust and keep it off anything with a comment section. Friday I turn this into a full workflow.
JOIN THE WAITLIST
I’ll be teaching my next in-person Claude Workshop in Boston on Thursday, September 24th. If you’re in the area block your calendar now so you won’t miss it. Send me an email if you’d like more information and stay tuned here for registration details.
-Matt
A note from Wispr Flow b/c its a tool I use every day…
PRDs by voice. Bug reports by voice. Ship faster.
Dictate acceptance criteria and reproductions inside Cursor or Warp. Wispr Flow auto-tags file names, preserves syntax, and gives you paste-ready text in seconds. 4x faster than typing.
