The email, that novelty relic whom no one has been able to kill, is about to suffer its greatest metamorphosis. Hotmail or Gmail brought storage and search capacity, clients of third parties such as Spark introduced a new way of managing them.
What is coming is deeper: AI is making The mail goes from being a writing activity to a decision activity. To write answers to mark boxes.
The first systems are already here:
- Gmail summarizes long threads and develops basic ideas.
- Outlook suggests short answers.
- Apple Intelligence summarizes, rewrite and expand paragraphs.
- Spark directly Take your previous mails to emulate your voice and generate answers with your style.
It is just the prologue. When this goes more, We will stop writing most mails, we will simply approve a proposalor we will clarify it. Or we will choose between certain options.
In the future, our mail clients will present each mail not as a text to read, but as an action proposal:
- Accept meeting Thursday at 11:00 a.m.
- Thank information and ask for more details.
- Decline proposal.
A touch and ready.
It is an inevitable change because in the background mail has always been a task management system disguised as communication. Most professional emails ask for something: confirmation, information, decision, action.
The AI simply naked this reality, eliminates the liturgy of forced courtesy and repetitive writing. I have written thousands of times “thanks in advance” or “good weekend.” The machine can do it for us. Even in our style. And it will free us from that corporate slavery for what really matters: decide.
The end of the game will be something we already anticipate: Bots speaking with bots. As MG Siegler points out, there will come a time when the AI will automatically schedule that meeting with the AI of your contact, negotiate dates, send reminders, write the subsequent act, until asking how your child after the operation, perhaps.
Humans We will appear for decisions that really require human criteria (Some will also want to delegate that, but it is another issue). And the mail will not disappear, but it will largely be somewhat invisible. And by automating routine communication, we will recover the communication that is worth it.
In WorldOfSoftware | From chaos to calm: thus manage my email using the technique of “inbox zero“
Outstanding image | Spark, WorldOfSoftware
