Email's AI Executioners Hit a Wall: Why Your Inbox Isn't Going Anywhere
The Financial Times posed a question this week that's been rattling around corporate America since ChatGPT launched: Can AI liberate us from the tyranny of email?
Here's the thing nobody wants to admit in public—especially not the vendors selling AI email assistants at $30 per seat per month: email isn't a technology problem. It's a coordination problem. And coordination problems, as any CFO who's tried to standardize expense reporting across three acquired subsidiaries can tell you, don't get solved by better software. They get solved by changing how humans behave, which is to say, they don't get solved at all.
The AI pitch is seductive. Smart assistants will draft your responses, prioritize your inbox, schedule your meetings, and generally transform email from a soul-crushing obligation into a frictionless communication layer. The demo is always incredible. The reality is that you're still checking your phone at 11 PM because Karen from procurement has "just one quick question" about the vendor approval workflow.
(I should note: I have no idea if there's actually a Karen in procurement. But there's always a Karen in procurement, and she always has just one quick question.)
The fundamental problem is that email succeeded precisely because it's terrible. It's asynchronous, which means you can ignore it. It's unstructured, which means you can use it for anything. It creates a permanent record, which means nobody can claim they weren't told. These aren't bugs—they're the features that made email the universal solvent of corporate communication.
AI can make email faster. It cannot make email unnecessary. Because the reason your inbox has 847 unread messages isn't that you're bad at processing text—it's that you're drowning in coordination costs. Every email represents a decision someone else is trying to push onto your plate. "Can you review this?" "What do you think about this?" "Should we do this?" The AI can draft the response, but it can't make the decision. That's still your job.
Here's the other thing: even if AI could eliminate email, what replaces it? Slack? Teams? Some blockchain-enabled decentralized communication protocol that definitely won't get hacked? Every email replacement eventually becomes email, just with worse search and more animated GIFs. The medium changes; the underlying problem—too many people need too many things from you—does not.
The more interesting question, which the FT piece presumably explores behind its paywall, is whether AI changes the economics of coordination itself. If an AI can handle 80% of routine email traffic, does that free up human attention for the 20% that actually matters? Or does it just create more email, because now the marginal cost of sending one has dropped to zero?
My money's on the latter. We've seen this movie before. Every productivity tool that promised to reduce communication overhead—email itself, instant messaging, project management software—just created more communication. Because the bottleneck was never the technology. It was the fact that modern organizations run on a constant stream of micro-decisions, and somebody has to make them.
The real tyranny of email isn't the volume. It's that it's a symptom of how we've organized work itself—as a series of asynchronous handoffs between people who are all simultaneously overcommitted. AI can optimize the handoffs. It can't eliminate the need for them.
Which means your inbox isn't going anywhere. It's just going to get faster at filling up.
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