A journalist at the Financial Times just spent a week testing all the major AI email tools (fyxer, gmail, gemini, copilot) on their actual work inbox ( archive link because paywall ) and determined that the suggested replies missed “important details, or even the entire point of an email thread” so frequently she only trusted them for the simplest messages. ChatGPT’s Gmail integration she called “an exercise in frustration.” An email coach quoted in the piece said that frictionless automated email “has actually existed for a long time before AI, but we call it spam.” Seems you can pump half a billion $ into a dozen startups to keep “fixing email” but it won’t survive an actual test from someone who’s paid to test things. I didn’t find this all that surprising, because these tools are taking an email thread and then flattenting them into a long wall of text and running a language model over them, which might work if the email is something like “hey can we meet later” and reply “yes sure” But it can’t work if you have a complex thread with a lot of people and shifting context and new people added via CC, etc. because the model just sees text rather than what we see as a conversation This gets worse if you need to scale if you work with email automation and have like 200 ongoing deals across a hundred odd threads and are using an agent to feed to your CRM to keep track, it will miss details, guaranteed. If you’re working with email at any kind of scale and have found something that actually works, I’d love to hear about it because I haven’t yet. submitted by /u/EnoughNinja
Originally posted by u/EnoughNinja on r/ArtificialInteligence