Why I stopped pasting decks into ChatGPT

I used ChatGPT for about a year the way most knowledge workers do. A founder would send me a deck and I'd open ChatGPT in a new tab, drag the PDF in, ask "what are the biggest risks here?" Wait. Copy the answer. Switch back to Gmail. Paste it into a Notes app to refer to while writing my reply.

The whole flow takes maybe four minutes per deck. I look at four to six decks a day. That's twenty-five minutes of context-switching, every day, to use AI for something that should be a single email.

The most repeated request I've heard from other investors over the last year is some variant of: "I wish I could just forward stuff to AI like I forward to my analyst."

The friction adds up

There are two ways to use AI for work like reading a deck:

1. Switch contexts. Open the AI app or browser tab. Move the artifact (paste text, drag a file). Ask the question. Copy the answer. Switch back to where the work lives.
2. Bring AI into the context. Forward the email to a colleague-shaped AI. Get the answer back where you were going to read it anyway.

The first one is what every chat-based AI tool requires, including ChatGPT. The second one is what an AI assistant in your inbox does. The difference per task feels small, but per day, per week, it's the difference between using AI ten times and using AI thirty times.

And the second one supports work the first one doesn't. You can't paste a calendar invite into ChatGPT and have the parsed event end up on your calendar. You can't tell ChatGPT to read all the decks that arrive tomorrow morning between 7 and 9 and summarize them by 9:15. You can't cc ChatGPT on a deal thread and have it tell you when to weigh in.

Email isn't just where the work lives. It's where the interactions live. An AI assistant that lives there can act on threads, attachments, schedules, contacts, and timing in a way that a chatbot in a separate window can't.

Forward, don't paste

That's the operational shift. A deck arrives. Instead of opening a tab and dragging the PDF in, you forward the email and add one line:

To: marvin@ccmarvin.com

Hi Marvin,

Memo on this. What are the biggest risks, and what would you want to diligence before a second meeting?

Two minutes later the memo is back in the same thread, ready to reply from. The deck never left your inbox. The rest works the same way:

• A research question comes up. You email Marvin. The report lands while you do other things.
• A weekly briefing on a topic. You ask Marvin once to set it up. It arrives every Monday at 7.
• A long thread with a complicated decision. You cc Marvin and ask him to summarize and recommend.

There's no separate app. No new login. No daily commit to "remember to use the AI." You use the verbs you already use (forward, reply, cc) and the AI is at the other end.

What you give up

A few things, honestly.

You give up the instant copy-paste of a response into another tool. With Marvin, the response comes back as an email reply, not a string you can immediately drop into a Google Doc. (If you want it in a doc, forward the reply to yourself with the doc address.)

You give up some of ChatGPT's depth on niche technical topics. Marvin is built for inbox knowledge work: analysis, research, summarization, scheduling, briefing. For "explain Kubernetes to me in detail," ChatGPT is still better.

You give up the synchronous loop of "respond, ask follow-up, respond" in fast succession. Marvin is asynchronous: you get the report back in a minute or two, not in real time word-by-word. For deep research, that's a feature, since you go do other things. For "let's brainstorm together right now," ChatGPT remains the right tool.

What you get

In exchange:

• The AI is in the same place your work is.
• Forwarding takes no thought; pasting and switching does.
• Scheduled work (daily briefs, weekly summaries) is a single email to set up, then it's automatic.
• Threads can include AI as a participant. CC Marvin on a deal thread and he's available to your team in-context.
• Attachments get the right tool automatically. A PDF gets analyzed. A spreadsheet gets parsed. A calendar invite gets actioned. You don't pick the right tool; you forward and the right tool runs.

That last one is the under-appreciated win. When the AI lives in your inbox, every attachment is a candidate for its tools. You don't have to decide which AI service to use for which file type. You just forward.

How to try

Forward the next thing you'd ordinarily paste into ChatGPT to Marvin instead. A deck, a 10-K, a long Substack post, a thread you need to triage. Forward it and ask the question in the body:

To: marvin@ccmarvin.com

Hi Marvin,

Pull out the three numbers that changed most from last quarter and flag anything that looks inconsistent with what they told us in August.

The reply comes back where you were going to read it anyway:

From: Marvin marvin@ccmarvin.com

Hi Rachel,

Three biggest moves from Q2: net revenue retention down 8 points to 104%, sales headcount up 22%, and cash runway cut from 19 months to 13. The retention drop is worth a question; in August they framed churn as "two one-off enterprise losses," but this looks like broader softening in the mid-market cohort.

Sincerely,
Marvin

That's enough to feel the difference, and to tell whether the email-native version is worth more of your week.