Does desktop AI need to see my screen?

That is the usual mechanism, and it is why scope and permissions matter: what it may read, when it is active, and whether anything leaves the machine should all be explicit.

Does it replace the web app?

No. It is the same context layer reached from a different surface. Longer work tends to stay in the app; desktop AI covers the in-the-moment tasks.

Desktop AI

Desktop AI is AI that sits inside the everyday computer workflow, rather than in a separate app someone has to switch to.

The cost of a separate destination is not the switch itself but the re-explaining. Whatever is on screen, the document, the ticket, the call, has to be described to the AI tool before it can help, and the result has to be carried back by hand. For short tasks that overhead is larger than the task.

Desktop AI removes that round trip by working from what the person is already looking at, and acting back into the same tools. The interesting part is that it changes which tasks are worth delegating: work too small to be worth describing becomes worth asking for, which is usually where most of the time actually goes.

Frequently Asked Questions

An extension is limited to the browser. Desktop AI works across native applications too, which is where a lot of enterprise work still happens.