From the Salad Days of Email to the Present

I first started using email in college. To date myself, my first email client was Eudora. My experience was neutral or even pleasant, but it’s gone downhill since then.

Now email is a necessary evil of the professional’s toolkit. It is a makeshift to-do list, it is a minefield of stars and bookmarks, reminding me of the infinite conveyor belt of work that needs to be done.

Email Overload and the 28% Workday Trap: Understanding the True Cost to Productivity

What percentage of your work consists of emailing people?

McKinsey estimates that email consumes 28% of the typical workday, or approximately 2.6 hours per day. Other studies estimate that 23% of work time is spent on email, often derailing productivity.

Are knowledge workers basically glorified email drafters? Should we strive as a work force to minimize email, rather than allow it to bloat to nearly one third of our work? Surely there is a more efficient way.

Just think: what percentage of your mindspace and your stress level is consumed by email? How many times have you thought to yourself or even said out loud: “I have to write an email.”

Work frequently gets blocked behind the almighty unwritten email. And units of work can be expressed and counted as unwritten emails: the email to a prospective investor that sits half-written; the inbound email from a prospective employee that rests idle; the email from a potential customer that you bookmarked mentally but totally forgot to reply to.

Responding to emails is a modern day Sisyphean hell for most knowledge workers.

But imagine you were a senior executive and had reports who read and triaged your email inbox for you. If you were the CEO of a trillion dollar company, you probably couldn’t make email work 28% of your day. You would spend your time doing high leverage deal-making, not playing low-level email ping pong. Sure, the occasional email should be read or drafted by you, but the large majority would need to be handed off.

Transforming Your Inbox with AI: How Email Agents Can Finally Set You Free

With advances in AI, ordinary workers can experience the magic of automatic email delegation. The AI email agent is at your service, ready for duty. Email agents like Truva can apply high-IQ processing to your email inbox, responding in a trustworthy manner to predictable use cases.

The power of LLMs coupled with the modality of email instead of chat promises a massive unlock for professionals chained to their email. Of course, mastering email rather than letting email master you requires good tools and good training.

Leveraging this technology requires a leap of faith. What if the AI misrepresents you? What if the AI is up-to-date, but you aren’t, with communications happening behind your back?

To me, that’s like saying you prefer manual gear-shifting in your car over automated gear-shifting, power steering and collision avoidance, part and parcel of many modern cars. Yes, the tech will have to work reliably, but the world is moving forward whether you’re ready to leverage it or not.

Your competitors and your colleagues will be using AI email agents to triage their inbox and will be able to glide through their work much more easily. As is the case with most AI advances, a competitive advantage is there for the taking and it’s up to you to grab it.

With email being the bane of most professionals’ existence, why not automate away the inglorious parts? Why not task AI email autoresponders to send back intelligent and eloquent replies that follow a natural language set of instructions that you specify.

For the first time in the decades since email was invented, the shackles of email may finally be loosening. Here’s your chance to free yourself.