Bet you didn't see this AI impact on your emails

Horrified.

That’s how I felt after watching an Apple TV ad spruiking its AI (Apple Intelligence) for emails.

It’s a business lunch with a writer meeting to discuss a pitch she’d emailed actor Bella Ramsey.

Bella, who obviously hasn’t read the email, quickly reaches for her phone and reads the AI generated summary of it, helping her feign knowledge of the project.

She lies, effectively.

The writer gets excited and says “Great, I’ll tell them you’re interested”.

Cue music track called “Genius” and a smug look on Bella’s face.

Why she’s smug, I’m not sure, because she's just committed herself to either (a) a bad project or (b) a difficult conversation down the track when backing out of it, because this thin slicing, gist-ising approach to information can only end badly.

But…the main reason I’m horrified is its inevitability.

This is how people will ingest our emails.

👉 The path of least resistance means we’re attracted to short cuts, especially when we are short on time or energy, so AI cutting to the chase will be appealing.

The upside is your audience may glean more about your message than just the subject line. The downside is they may rely upon the summary to decide what to do. 

Similar but not the same as preview text

For the reader, this will serve the same function as preview text. 

👉 But not for you as the writer.

Preview text is controlled by you, which means you can withhold key information so your recipient reads it in context. 

While an AI summary will save you the pain of having to write preview text, you will lose control of what you want to reveal, when.

That means knowing how to write effective emails, to influence behaviour as well as AI, is only becoming more important.

I can help you with that.