My daily AI workflow and routine look like what most people end up with. An AI browser for deep research, and a chatbot to make sense of the information. In my case, Gemini and Perplexity fill those roles for the most part. It works, but it also involves a lot of context and tab switching just to get my hands on small snippets of information or check something quickly.

There’s an AI tool I’ve been sleeping on quite a bit that has been right under my nose this entire time, and it solved the issue of tool-hopping once I gave it a real shot. I’m talking about my regular browser’s in-built AI tool, Brave Leo. This AI chatbot handles everything I actually need in one place, with the added layer of privacy-first assistance. Here’s how it can replace tools like Gemini and Perplexity for a daily workflow…

What exactly is Leo?

Brave’s AI integration

Brave Leo is an AI tool built directly into the Brave browser, not a separate app or extension. It lives in the sidebar and address bar (though this is customizable), so you can interact with AI while you’re browsing instead of jumping to another tab or service. Technically, it works as a browser-native interface that can read the context of any page you’re on and let you ask questions about it, summarize it, translate it, or generate new material without leaving the tab. But it also has its own separate, full-page interface that you can use independently of your current tabs.

Leo isn’t a single model, it’s more like a routing layer that connects to multiple LLMs such as Mixtral, Llama, and Claude, depending on the setup or tier you’re using (I’m using the free tier with most of the default configurations). Brave hosts these models on its own infrastructure for privacy, so your data isn’t sent to the model creators. It also has a “bring your own model” feature, so you can plug in local models running on your machine or connect to external APIs.

A big part of Leo’s design is privacy. Requests are anonymized, chats aren’t retained on Brave’s servers, and responses are discarded after they’re generated. Chat history can be stored locally on your device if you set it up that way, though. Overall, Leo is aimed at people who want AI integrated directly into browsing. Instead of opening separate AI tools, the browser itself becomes the interface for asking questions, analyzing pages, and working with information.

How Leo replaces Perplexity for browsing

AI-layered search

For a lot of people, Perplexity is an AI search engine that basically replaces traditional search entirely. Leo sits in a slightly different spot, which is exactly why it works better for me. Leo is layered on top of Brave’s search and browsing experience instead of replacing it. When you run a search in Brave, you’ll get the AI summary at the top of the page (if you enabled it). You can also continue a chat with these results and Leo will keep pulling in real-time search data, and present it according to your prompt.

The difference to Perplexity is that Leo is an optional AI layer rather than a standalone search engine. I can rely on traditional search, then bring in Leo to ask questions about any page I’m on whenever I want. It’s built into Brave’s interface and its visibility is customizable - I don’t have Leo’s panel enabled by default, but I access it from the hamburger menu whenever I need to, or just rely on the summary with the chat panel at the top of my searches. There’s no jump between searching, researching, and learning as there is with a Perplexity + Gemini combo.

What I like is how it reflects what’s actually going on on the internet. The information itself can still be wrong if the top results themselves are wrong, but Leo’s summaries always line up closely with what those pages say. And this is what follow-up questions in the chat panel are for: to pull in second opinions and cross-analyze different results.

How Leo replaces Gemini

It covers my everyday chatbot routine

This is where Leo shifts to being a full chatbot. While I primarily use the Leo chatbot in the search results page, it also has its own interface that you can use independently in a separate window. This is what I use for deeper work or when I need more conversational responses. I also love that I don’t have to be precise about what I’m looking for since it’s excellent at inferring what I mean, plus, it still pulls from real-time web data.

This interface comes with a couple of presets such as “explain” and “paraphrase” for quick queries. And it lets you upload documents, using retrieval augmented generation that enables you to interact with those files. Again, Brave’s privacy-forward philosophy shows up with controls like “temporary chat”. Moreover, Brave has custom Skills that you can build to perform certain repetitive tasks; they’re kind of like Gemini Gems.

Leo does it better

Gemini and Perplexity are by no means bad, but Brave’s Leo does the same things, with the added convenience of already being integrated into my daily browser, which I practically live in. Plus, it’s a lot more transparent and gives you more control over how your data is handled.