AI Was Supposed to Save Time. So Why Does It Feel Slower?

Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

The AI paradox: endless prompting, re-prompting, fact-checking, formatting and decision paralysis. Sound familiar? You are not alone. Shift Browser’s 2026 AI Consumer Insights Survey of more than 1,400 U.S. adults found that roughly a third of users engage with AI daily, and more than half say it improves their experience. In theory, that should mean a productivity boom. 

But if you spend your day writing, planning and pitching, you may have noticed something else: AI can reduce drafting time while increasing decision time.

After 25 years in communications, where speed and output are everything, I know how easy it can be to get swept up by shiny tools that promise to streamline your work.  

You’re reading something. You hit a paragraph you want to understand more deeply. Without thinking, you highlight, copy it, paste it into your AI tool of choice, wait for a response… then switch back to where you were. But when you're working across multiple accounts, distractions creep in and focus breaks. The truth is, AI is helping us think faster in moments, but it can also interrupt the flow we need to do meaningful work.

The Real Cost Isn’t Time. It’s Attention.

Most of modern work already lives inside the browser: 20 tabs open, documents half-finished, ideas in motion. It’s messy, but it’s real.

In PR especially, where you’re often juggling messaging, executive Q&A prep and coverage reporting all at once, the browser is your workspace.

So when AI entered the picture, it became another place to go, and that’s where the disconnect starts. Every interruption - even for something useful - makes it harder to maintain momentum. 

And the number of tools that we use every day keeps growing: Slack, Google Drive, Zoom, ChatGPT, Gemini, Trello, etc. The more places we have to jump, the more friction we build into the work.

The Workflow Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

What’s interesting is that none of this is about whether AI works. It clearly does. The issue is where it lives.

Most AI tools still sit outside the environments where work actually happens. And without realizing it, the time it takes to switch between an article, an app, a document and an AI tool starts adding up. If you’re juggling work and personal tasks in parallel, the context-switching gets even worse - for you and for the AI. 

Say you’re planning a fundraiser for your kid’s school, then you pivot to a client event. Suddenly you’re re-explaining basics, re-stating constraints and correctly merged contexts that shouldn’t have collided in the first place.  

A Shift in How AI Shows Up

What’s starting to change isn’t what AI can do - it’s where it shows up. Instead of asking users to go find AI, some tools are starting to bring AI into the workflow itself. 

That’s the idea behind alternative browser Shift, which recently rolled out Shift AI: a browser native assistant that lives within a profile (or Space) and provides context-aware help where you’re already working.

Let’s say you’re putting together a communications campaign, you can ask what you may have missed, and Shift AI can pull context from the tabs you have open. You can summarize incoming Slack messages to make sure nothing directed at you gets dropped. Then you can switch to a personal Space, ask for help planning a trip to Italy, and keep those AI conversations  separate - so your work context stays with work and your personal context is separate. 

In other words: if your work runs through the browser, your AI can move with you, but only when you choose to bring it in.

As Michael Foucher, VP of Product and Customer Success at Shift, puts it,  “AI shouldn’t live in another tab. It should live where you work and it should work on your terms.” 

Control and Privacy Matters More Than We Think

There’s another dynamic playing out alongside workflow friction, but framed as “privacy,” and with real implications for how people adopt AI day to day.

Shift's AI Survey also found 44% worry AI could act without their approval and 48% cited privacy as their top concern. 

People don’t fully trust AI yet. And whether we admit it or not, that uncertainty changes behavior: we hesitate, we hold back context, we double-check outputs, and we keep sensitive work out of the tools entirely. 

Shift says it addresses this by building privacy into the infrastructure, protecting user identity and separating AI queries before they reach the AI model. 

As Mari Galicer, Director of Product Management at Cloudflare stated, “As an essential privacy layer for the AI era, Cloudflare is proud to partner with Shift to help deliver secure, browser-native AI experiences at the edge."

The Next Phase of Productivity

For years, the idea of productivity has been tied to “do more, faster” and “work smarter, not harder.” Both can be true but only when there’s order to the work: across clients, internal teams, and the rest of life competing for attention. 

The real gains in the AI era may not come from adding more layers, but from removing the ones that interrupt us. 

There’s a version of AI that makes everything faster in theory, but more fragmented in practice.

And then there’s a version that supports how people actually work - messy, multi-threaded and context heavy. 

We’re just starting to see the difference between the two. Because in the end, productivity isn’t just about how quickly you can generate a response. It’s about how long you can stay immersed in the work in front of you.