Josh Miller says Dia could be the “Macintosh for AI”

The Browser Company CEO Josh Miller thinks today’s AI chatbots still feel like clunky command lines, and he wants Dia to make AI feel natural on a desktop. Speaking on the Dialectic podcast, Miller said they risked everything on Dia thinking, “Hey, let’s go be that iMac or that Macintosh for AI. Let’s try.”

That bet comes down to how we use computers in 2026, with Miller admitting he hates touching his laptop on weekends because it has become purely a work machine.

While OpenAI was chasing regular consumers to become the next Google, Miller’s team noticed AI models were mostly just great at helping people do their jobs. As he put it, “Hey, we think the main interface to AI on your computer, at least for work or school, is going to look like a browser.”

Since people use it for work, charging for the software made more sense than running ads. “If everyone’s using it for productivity use cases, you’re not going to build an ad business off of that,” Miller explained, noting that “an ad business will have weird incentives if you do that.”

It took him years to accept that, even though Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes had been telling him “You’re monetizing this thing all wrong. You’re going to realize you’re an enterprise company” since the early Arc days.

Cannon-Brookes used to send the team a steady stream of bug reports and even offered to personally cover their payroll when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, which helped Miller trust him — even when his advice was frustrating. That shift reflects what Cannon-Brookes recently shared about building a doer, rather than a browser, for people who spend their days working inside web apps.

Miller also noted that as AI models become equally smart and cheap, your browser has an edge because it already knows which Notion or Confluence doc you opened seven times in the past two days.

He also brought up what he calls the “Williamsburg coffee shop test,” where walking into any cafe during the day looks like a computer lab with everyone living inside their browser tabs. Even with new desktop AI tools popping up, people still rely on web apps like Figma or Google Meet and end up pasting their AI work straight into a browser tab anyway.

To make AI actually feel like a normal desktop app instead of a clunky chatbot, Miller thinks the industry still needs its own version of Susan Kare’s classic Macintosh icons. You can watch the video below for more context on this:

He also suggested that The Browser Company may be moving away from the flashy, direct-to-camera announcement videos they once made. Now that they’re part of Atlassian, they’re looking forward to exploring fresh ways to share their story.

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