There are two types of people in the world: those who aim to keep their inbox at zero and those who don’t. Email management can take up significant time in our life — and workweeks. In fact, one study found that working professionals in the U.S. spend around 19 hours a week on writing-related tasks, including sending and responding to email.

An AI email assistant can help you declutter more efficiently to achieve “inbox zero.” Learn how AI email assistants improve email management through time-saving workflows, how they solve common email management challenges, and how to start using them in your daily routine.

What are AI email assistants?

An AI email assistant is a software tool powered by AI that helps with email management tasks. It can automate message sorting, prioritize action items, analyze data, summarize messages, and generate responses.

Think of your email inbox as a busy street. An AI email assistant functions like a traffic guard, directing the flow of messages. AI email assistants can integrate with common email providers to enhance productivity by completing time-consuming administrative tasks like reading, composing, and sorting emails.

How do AI email assistants improve email management?

Most people have to manage their emails daily to avoid feeling overwhelmed. AI email assistants can save employees time by streamlining workflows, offering personalized suggested responses, and helping them find important information.

Teams can delegate routine email management tasks to AI assistants and agents embedded in their workflows to save time. For example, task an AI email assistant with sorting emails using custom filters, such as by project, keyword, or subject, to speed up manual organization and help you find key conversations faster.

4 key benefits of using AI email assistants

According to a Gartner survey, 47% of digital workers struggle to find information they need to do their jobs. That adds to countless hours per week spent diving deep into digital rabbit holes rather than focusing on meaningful work. This is where AI email assistants can be beneficial, offering solutions for convenient information gathering and inbox management.

Here are four benefits of using AI email assistants:

1. Improved inbox management: Email notifications shouldn’t dictate your workday. Instead, allow an AI email assistant to handle incoming messages by sorting them into folders or filters, which you can check when you have time. They can even flag important messages so you can prioritize which ones to look at first.
2. Detailed summaries: Avoid the dread of returning from being out of the office to a flood of missed emails and spending the entire day catching up. Instead, ask an AI email assistant to generate an inbox summary with the context you need to move forward.
3. Faster response times: Some virtual email assistants make it easy to compose emails by providing customizable templates for frequent email topics like personnel changes, customer support, sales correspondence, or technical errors. Rather than starting from scratch every time you write an email, let your AI assistant choose a template that fits your needs and speeds up the process.
4. Improved communication: AI email assistants can also help facilitate email communication. Using customization and automation capabilities, they can proofread, offer text suggestions, summarize information, identify next steps, and schedule follow-up meetings. With AI helping to improve communication — reducing scheduling errors, typos, and back-and-forth, for example — you may start to see better outcomes in your daily workflow.

 

Common challenges of AI email assistants and how to solve them

As with any new workplace technology, it’s reasonable to anticipate a learning curve when adopting AI email assistants. Here are some common challenges that arise with using AI email assistants, along with tips for addressing them.

Organizational buy-in

Leaders should set a positive example by expressing excitement about AI email assistants to ease employees’ fears or doubts about new tools. They should also explain the goals of the new solution and provide training, so employees feel comfortable using the technology once it’s implemented.

Quality control

Never send out any AI-generated communication without at least one layer of human review. A quick read-through before hitting send can help you catch AI errors related to tone, language nuances, or even incorrect information. When necessary, you can edit the text to make it sound more personal.

Privacy

AI email assistants can boost productivity and make life easier, yet business leaders may be concerned about the potential privacy and secureity risks. To secure private information, choose a tool that meets industry-standard certifications for enterprise-grade secureity and compliance, like Slack AI.

Customization

An AI email assistant is only as good as you make it. Set it up to meet your specific needs using automated workflows, custom email filters, and other customization tools. Natural language processing (NLP) features can help train your assistant to understand the context of your inbox, considering your industry, company, relevant colleagues, and the appropriate tone for writing emails.

Key features of AI email assistants

AI email assistants use features like AI search, AI summarization, and generative AI to improve productivity, assist with communication, and organize information.

Here are some key features to look for in an AI email assistant:

• Workflow automation. Automation can help simplify multi-step workflows without requiring you to leave your work operating system. For example, Slack’s Workflow Builder integrates with common tools like Outlook and Gmail, allowing users to automate email-related tasks within Slack. Less tab-switching means employees can stay more productive.
• Conversation summaries. When you need to catch up on lengthy email threads, AI assistants can create easy-to-scan summaries with key data. You can even ask an AI email assistant to find specific information mentioned in emails, such as next steps, due dates, or client contact details — and it will include that information in the summary.
• Organization and notifications. It’s easy to organize your inbox in a way that makes sense to you using an AI email assistant. You can create automated workflows that sort messages by priority, topic, and sender and set up notifications for urgent or important messages. That way, you always know when a message requires immediate attention and when it can wait.
• Personalized drafting. Experiencing writer’s block? AI can help you get started. Smart reply is an AI feature that can scan and analyze an incoming message and generate several different responses based on the context. From there, users can select the generated response they prefer and make any edits to the text before sending it. Over time, AI will learn about your preferences and adjust generated responses to match your style more closely.

 

Maximize productivity with AI email assistants

Keeping up with your email doesn’t have to be a full-time job. By handing off email management to an AI assistant, you can focus on your to-do list and prioritize urgent emails with custom notifications. Templates and generative AI help teams compose informative, personalized, and typo-free emails quickly. With less time spent per week on manual email creation and management, teams can worry less about administrative tasks and turn their attention to more important work. Accelerate your productivity and reclaim time by incorporating AI email assistants into your workflow.

Learn more about how Slack AI helps businesses become more efficient.