Why Integrated Copilots Suck

Most ordinary people’s experience of AI in 2026 is pressing a small blue button inside a tool they already resent using. It says “Ask AI” or “Copilot” or, if the product team was feeling ambitious, “Your AI Assistant.” It knows nothing about you beyond what exists inside that one application. It gives you a mediocre answer. You close the panel and go back to doing the thing manually.This is the median AI experience right now, and it often only makes things worse.The context problemThe value of an AI response is deeply dependent on the relevant context it can access. Consider what happens when Slack ships an AI feature. It can see your Slack messages. It cannot see your email, your calendar, your codebase, your CRM, your documents, or the contents of your head. So when you ask it to help you prepare for a meeting, it can summarise what people said in the channel last week. Helpful, in the way that a calculator is helpful to someone who already knows the answer.Now consider what happens…