AI Browser Automation: A Realistic Guide to What Works and What Doesn't

Picture this: an AI that watches how you browse the web, learns your patterns, and then takes over all the boring stuff. Product searches, online shopping, booking appointments—all handled while you do something more interesting. That's the promise of AI-powered browser automation, and it's getting significant investment and attention right now.

The big players are going all-in on this. Comet from Perplexity, Atlas from OpenAI—these aren't side projects. There's real money and serious engineering going into making this work. You've probably read articles about what these tools can do, but here's the thing: you need to try them yourself to understand what they're actually capable of versus what's just marketing hype.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/

The underlying tech isn't brand new. What's changed is that these systems are getting smarter, faster, and cheaper to run. But let's be clear: we're not at the point where you can just tell an AI "handle all my online stuff" and walk away. That future is coming, but it's not here yet.

Why should you care about how AI browser automation works?
Look, I get it—you don't want to become a tech expert just to use these tools. But here's why understanding the basics matters: if you misjudge what an AI can actually do, you'll end up more frustrated than if you'd just done it yourself. Give it a task it can't handle, and you'll waste time fixing its mistakes. Ignore it entirely, and you'll watch your colleagues get more done with less effort. Five minutes understanding how this works will save you hours of headaches down the road.

Having worked with browser automation and AI for years, I have watched this field evolve from clunky scripts to tools with real, practical applications. In this post, I'm going to take a more unbiased and nuanced approach and demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of these tools. We'll examine both browser assistants that run on your computer and cloud-based agents that handle everything remotely.

To show you what works and what doesn't, I'm going to use a real challenge throughout this article:

Compiling a list of the top 100 GitHub AI projects, complete with short descriptions, star counts, and links.

This is the kind of task that sounds simple but reveals all the cracks in these systems.

Let’s dive in.