AI-Powered Chrome Extensions for the Web Apps You Can't Replace
There has been a lot of discussion recently about companies using AI to build internal tools that replace SaaS licenses. That is interesting, but it misses a big category of software: the web apps you cannot replace.
Sometimes the constraint is technical. More often, it is not. An insurance company may require you to use its verification portal. A specialty vendor may only accept orders through a clunky ecommerce site. Or a marketplace may be where all of the demand for your product or service lives.
You can build a better internal tool, but you still have to use those sites.
The browser is the integration point
Chrome extensions have always been a way to change the experience of a site you do not control. An extension can read information from a page, add controls to it, and help guide a user through a workflow.
Historically, that was possible but often not practical. You needed to write and maintain custom code for every awkward workflow, and the payoff had to be large enough to justify it.
The latest AI models change that calculation. It is now much easier to build an extension that augments a legacy site, whether that means changing a workflow, extracting information from a page, or adding LLM capabilities directly where people are already working.
Instead of asking someone to copy information from one system into another, you can put the assistance in the browser tab where the work already happens.
A bike search on Facebook Marketplace
I recently had a good excuse to try this out. I was looking for a bike on Facebook Marketplace with a specific set of requirements. The hard part was not finding listings. It was reviewing the photos for each listing to determine whether a bike was actually a fit.
Doing that manually meant opening and reviewing dozens of listings every day. That is exactly the sort of repetitive visual task that an AI model can help with.
So I built a Chrome extension that uses OpenAI to review listing photos and flag the listings that match what I was looking for. Rather than replacing Facebook Marketplace, the extension improves the part of the Marketplace workflow that was taking the most time.
The result is not a fully autonomous bike buyer. It is a faster way to narrow down a large list of listings so I can spend my time looking at the promising ones.
Where this approach works
The Marketplace example is personal, but the pattern applies to business workflows too. Look for web-based processes where a person repeatedly has to review, classify, summarize, or move information before they can make a decision.
A Chrome extension can be a practical place to add help to:
- an insurer’s required portal
- a vendor ordering site
- a marketplace your team depends on
- an internal legacy application that is difficult to change
The goal is not necessarily to replace the site. It is to remove the tedious steps around it while keeping people in the workflow they already need to use.
See it in action
Check out the demo below to see the bike finder at work:
Interested in building something similar for a workflow your team cannot avoid? Get in touch with Setfive.