Email and inbox management are some of the biggest tasks your executive assistant will face — is it a good idea to entrust something so important to artificial intelligence?
A leader’s inbox ends up being a giant catch-all for anyone vying for your attention.
Important business emails are mixed with marketing, reminders, client requests, and spam. Your EA has to sort through all of it.
Boldly EAs spend up to 20 hrs/week managing inboxes for their executives. You’re probably already using other AI tools — why not plug your inbox into it and make things easier for your executive assistant? 57% of marketers in large companies turned to using AI for their emails in 2023 so it must be working, right?
There are good reasons to use AI for email management, but also reasons to be cautious.
The Two Most Common Ways Of Using AI For Email Management
AI can be used with email in two main ways:
- Automated sorting and inbox management
- Generating actual content
We’ll start with the inbox management — email programs and add-ons can use AI to:
- Analyze your email habits and inbox behavior to sort your mail better
- Summarize the content of emails
- Suggest additional email recipients
- Filter spam messages
- Suggest reply reminders
- Star/flag important messages
- Task creation, and so on.
Many of these features are already standard in various email clients. Handy.
But AI is not without errors. Even though it’s probably been a while since an important email ended up in your spam folder it still happens.
A premium executive assistant should still perform manual checks to make sure your inbox is functioning, important emails aren’t going to spam, and outgoing email is properly written.
Which leads us to the second use of AI, that of generating content. It gets a bit trickier.
For that, we need to take a deeper dive into the pros and cons in how to use AI for your business in an appropriate way.
The Advantages Of Using AI For Email Management
Microsoft recently debuted its new AI tool, Copilot for Microsoft 365. After just one month, users said:
64% said Copilot helps them spend less time processing email.
85% said Copilot helps them get to a good first draft faster.
75% said Copilot “saves me time by finding whatever I need in my files.”
Whether or not you’ll have that level of success, it’s at least true that your EA will see significant benefits in using AI to manage email, particularly in increased productivity.
There are several email management examples where this will happen:
- Automated categorization. Is an email important, needing follow-up, or just spam? AI automation can make that much faster by managing the inbox in a way that helps your EA (or you!) know whom to reply to, and when.
- Summarizing content. AI that summarizes an email adds another layer of at-a-glance productivity to a categorized inbox. Your EA can quickly see what an email is about and understand what needs an ASAP response.
- Faster responses. By automatically categorizing and summarizing emails, AI improves the speed at which your EA can respond to important clients and messages.
- Powerful subject lines. For sales, especially, an email subject line makes a message stand out. But you want your emails to be read, no matter what’s in it. AI has been trained on subject lines with the best open rates and conversions, and it can put that to work for your EA.
- Personalized experience. Consider that customers are 80% more likely to commit or buy when a company can personalize the experience, and that 72% will actually only respond to messages that are very specific to them. AI can increase the amount of personalization when in the past, replacing the name in the opening greeting of an email was about the best you could hope for in automation.
- Drafts and foundational copy. AI is great for generating draft copy or initial ideas that your EA can build on or manipulate to better fit your needs. This is a huge timesaver, particularly if AI has been trained to know the executive assistant email responses that are routinely used. This includes meeting invites, travel arrangements, and logistics, emails with factual information to act on.
- Correct spelling, grammar, and readability. Spell-check isn’t new, but the tools out there can help your EA write more clearly and correctly.
It’s an impressive list, but even so, your EA still needs to exercise caution.
When To Be Cautious Using AI For Email Management
Using AI for email management brings with it three areas of concern:
- Is the content appropriate?
- Are privacy and proprietary information protected?
- Is the information accurate and original?
Is AI Content Appropriate For The Situation?
Vanderbilt University has become the go-to warning for using AI to create email.
In response to a tragic situation, the university sent out an email to its student body. While the copy in the message wasn’t terrible, it included a notation that the email had used the ChatGPT personal communication model.
People don’t want AI responding to some personal or delicate situations. In this example, students wanted to hear from the university president, not AI.
Communication coming from your EA should reflect you.
It’s your tone and conversation that must come through. While your EA understands your personality and preferences, getting AI to understand the same things when it’s your EA interacting with it can be challenging.
And, as Vanderbilt University learned, no matter how perfect the email copy is there are situations where just knowing it was done by AI changes the message. Sometimes the message isn’t as important as knowing there is a personal, human connection behind it.
Is Privacy Protected?
AI improves by learning from the content it has access to — and it’s often the inputs you are providing.
Generative AI (used by tools like ChatGPT) has known privacy issues. AI has to feed on content to learn. That’s fine, until it’s your client’s personal information or the company’s intellectual property that AI nibbles on.
Be sure the AI email management tool you use comes with a promise of privacy and protection of information. You don’t need your internal data popping up in someone else’s AI output or research.
Is The Content Accurate And Original?
AI requires great prompts to function well, but even then it sometimes returns content that isn’t accurate. Or, it might be word-for-word from its source, creating a plagiarism issue. That’s why you should only use a content-generating AI system that provides easy access to the source(s) of its information.
Your EA can verify the source and see the original wording. Sources can be properly vetted and referenced. Your EA can take the AI-generated executive assistant email templates and make them unique for the situation with little effort.
Don’t forget that AI emails will be used by spammers, too, creating seemingly personalized messages. Your emails will get lost in the shuffle if you’re using the same cookie-cutter methods content spammers use.
Using AI For Email Management The Right Way
Knowing the pros and cons of using AI for email management, how do you move forward in using AI in your business?
Find The Right AI Email Client
As noted, AI is probably already at work in the tools your EA uses. But if you want your EA to use AI more purposefully, it starts with finding the right AI email client.
- Training period. Some AI tools clearly tell you that they learn from your behavior initially. Your EA has to “train” it to recognize what it needs to do. That means manual checks have to be in place initially and periodically to make sure it is on track. Judging a tool during the training period may skew your understanding of its value. Your EA must also carefully use the tool properly to train it correctly.
- Privacy concerns. Be sure the tool protects your information and doesn’t use it to learn, other than in learning how you want your information handled.
- Output quality. Some AI tools use better language models, and it’s noticeable in the output. If the output is poor, your EA may end up with more cleanup work than if your EA had handled it on their own.
- Understand its scope. There are tools specifically designed to compose emails quickly, making grammar and tone suggestions based on the prompts or context they’re given. Some create complete drafts, some provide ideas only. Talk to your EA about what would work best in your situation.
During the process of selecting a tool and using it, check in with your EA. Make sure they know how to use the AI tool correctly. Find out if AI helps your EA to be more productive.
The right AI email client is one your EA will actually enjoy using.
Keep Your Executive Assistant In Control
It’s not impossible to think that as AI gets better, we might have emails being sent and responded to by AI completely. Something is obviously lost in that exchange, which is why an AI email assistant can never replace your executive assistant.
It’s tempting to turn everything over to the machine and save the time and money that comes with having a human involved, but that’s exactly the problem. There are times when email responses require a human touch. It’s that human touch that might make your most important email messages stand out from the crowd.
At least for now, as good as it is with management and drafting, AI hasn’t mastered a truly empathetic human response. Consider it an excellent tool for your EA to use with that in mind.
