Six Ways to Use Artificial Intelligence to Better Manage Your Email

Technology seems to be advancing at lightning speed, but somehow we still communicate as often as it was in 1994: email is still used for both personal and business purposes, and it’s not going away anytime soon. While you can’t change society’s communication protocols, you can change the way you approach email itself. That is, if you so desire, you can introduce a bit of modern technology in the form of artificial intelligence tools into a much older messaging standard.

Whether these new AI tools will be particularly useful for your email experience depends on personal preference. However, these tools exist , and companies will continue to create and develop them. If you’re interested in improving your communication skills overall or are looking for virtual help to finally get to inbox zero, consider these six ways to use AI with email.

About accessing AI tools via email

There are many specialized AI applications for all types of purposes—email writing or other purposes—but you can safely ignore the vast majority of them. First, they usually want your money: Help Scout , for example, has compiled a roundup of various AI email assistants, including its own, that range in price from $4 to a whopping $49 per user per month. (Their own program costs $40 per user per month, whatever it costs.) This, in this AI skeptic’s humble opinion, is absurd.

Rather, if you’re interested in incorporating artificial intelligence into your email workflow, I think you’re better off relying on either free, accessible tools like the free chatbot Copilot , or trying programs built into email apps and platforms that you are already using. . For the latter, I’m thinking about options like Microsoft Copilot with Outlook, which isn’t cheap either—it requires two subscriptions to use: Copilot Pro ($20 per month) and Microsoft 365 ($6.99 per month or 69. $99/year). ).

For the most part, either option can help you with this, but below I’ll also talk about one specific situation in which you’ll need to turn to a paid third-party solution.

How to Use AI in Email

Composing your messages

If you spend most of your day (or perhaps most of it) writing emails, you might feel a little burnt out writing that last message before closing time. One of the “promises” of AI is that it can do all the tedious work for you. In this case, you can try using it to write emails on your behalf so that you don’t have to type each one yourself.

Of course, you don’t need the AI ​​to be running directly in or near your email app of choice to do this. You can always ask your chatbot of choice to compose an email on the topic of your choice and then copy and paste the results into your email.

However, if you’re up for it, you can rely on the built-in tools to do the same. For example, Copilot works directly in Outlook through the Draft with Copilot feature . You type the type of message you want (i.e. telling the team that the project has been given the green light with a completion date of the end of the month) and she will write your email.

No matter what method you use, the AI ​​will likely respond to feedback as well. Since AI is prone to errors , you may need to make some corrections. Your AI will most likely support changes in their results. If an AI-composed email isn’t quite on target, you can share what you’d like to see instead and the AI ​​will rewrite the message accordingly. How bots perceive your feedback will likely depend on how they are designed. For example, for Copilot, you can simply send another invitation with your changes, or select the Regenerate option, which gives you the opportunity to review the draft again.

Proofreading your letter

Spellcheck has probably saved your neck more than once. (I know it saved me.) But while spell checkers are great at identifying misspelled words, and grammar checkers are similarly good at identifying syntax problems, they are no substitute for an external editor who can take an objective look at your writing as a whole. and identify areas that need improvement.

If you don’t have a colleague who can scan a draft of your email, you can try using an artificial intelligence tool to discover things you may have missed yourself. Let’s say you decide to write an email yourself, but you don’t trust your eyes to read it carefully and spot errors or awkwardness. You can copy the text of the email and paste it into the chatbot and ask the bot to check your email for spelling and grammatical errors and for overall clarity.

Once both you and the bot like the text, simply copy it, paste it back into the email app and send.

Getting Writing Coaching

Beyond simple proofreading, Microsoft offers a feature called Coaching from Copilot that offers tips on how to improve your email writing skills. This can help in cases where you feel like your email needs to be hit but don’t know how or where.

The co-pilot will offer advice in three key categories: tone (perhaps you could be a little more formal in your message to the client), mood of the reader (perhaps there is an opportunity to address the recipient’s concerns more than you do), and clarity (you give enough detail in your response to answer the recipient’s questions?) Copilot will also offer specific examples of what you could say that matches its advice. If you like any of the suggestions, you can copy and paste them into your email.

Changing the tone of your messages

AI developers have long touted their technologies as great tools for rewriting your designs in a different tone. If your first attempt at sending an email, for example, is too informal—perhaps because you missed an underlying frustration or because you’re too used to messaging friends rather than colleagues—you can try tagging a bot to rewrite the text with using a more professional tone. If your email tends to be stoic and stilted, you can instruct the AI ​​to make it more fun and light-hearted, depending on who you’re sending the email to.

For example, Copilot in Outlook offers these tools in the editing menu of the Draft with Copilot feature. You can choose from “Straight”, “Neutral”, “Casual”, “Formal” or “Make it a Poem”. (Companies often like to throw at least one “fun” tone change into the mix, regardless of whether you actually use it.)

However, use these features with caution. Writing AI has its own quirks and tendencies that may be obvious to anyone who understands it. You may notice some flowery language when the AI ​​tries to rewrite a message to make it more personal, or strange word choices when it makes a message more serious.

Summarizing a long email or message thread

Even if you don’t want to use AI for any creative work, it can come in handy when reading long emails or long message threads. For example, if you have Copilot in Outlook, you’ll find a new Summary button at the top of your inbox. Using it, the AI ​​will scan one specific email or thread and summarize the key points for you. Copilot will also attach numbers to specific highlights so you can see where in the email or thread the bot pulled that information.

Managing your mailbox

Surprisingly, most mainstream AI email bots are primarily designed to create and summarize emails and don’t offer many features to actually manage your inbox. They tend to prioritize creating text over managing messages.

I imagine this will change in the near future (I’d be shocked if Microsoft didn’t invest in AI-powered email management solutions), but until then, you’ll need to turn to third-party options if you want to try out these features here . and now.

One option that seems worthy is Sanebox , an AI-powered extension that can be used with most email services, including Outlook. Here’s a quick overview of the key AI features:

• There’s SaneLater , which filters out less important messages from your inbox so you can check them later.

• Sanebox then filters future emails from these senders into this folder.

• If the email in question is a newsletter, advertisement, or any other message you don’t want to see again, there’s SaneBlackHole , which filters out those emails and deletes them on your behalf.

• Finally, there’s email deep cleaning : you can instruct the AI ​​to look for emails older than a certain date, and it will collect messages it thinks you don’t want in your archives. You’ll get a list of all the emails it finds and you can choose whether to keep them or delete them.

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