Company email and documents with help from AI
An inbox where most messages are about the same few things, and staff who keep asking about the same procedures. AI sorts, summarises and drafts. Answers cite their source. A person approves what gets sent.
What I implement
Email triage
Category, urgency, owner. A complaint goes to support, a quote request to sales, an invoice to accounts. You set the rules.
Thread summaries
A long thread with a customer in five sentences: what it is about, what was agreed, what is waiting for a decision. In the inbox or on the CRM record.
Draft replies
A reply in your company’s voice, with data from the CRM or a document. A person reads, edits and sends. AI does not send on its own.
A documents assistant
Procedures, price lists, terms, contracts. A question in plain language, an answer with a link to the paragraph. When the documents do not answer, the assistant says “I do not know”.
For staff or for customers
An internal assistant for procedures and contracts, or an external one for your offer and terms. Different sources, different accounts, different rules.
Outlook and Gmail
Microsoft 365 Copilot or Gemini where you already pay for them and they are enough. A custom integration through the API where you need logic the off-the-shelf tool does not have.
Personal data
Masking before anything goes to the model, a business account with the vendor with training switched off, data staying in your mailbox and on your drive.
A log
What AI received, what it proposed, who approved it and what they changed. For a monthly review and to explain any mistake.
How it goes
A call and a week of your inbox
What arrives, how much, who replies, how long it takes. We look at a real week, not an impression of one.
Categories and sources
A list of email categories and a list of documents the assistant may answer from. We drop anything out of date.
A prototype on your archive
AI sorts and drafts replies to last month’s emails. You compare them with what you actually sent. We count the agreement rate.
Go-live with approval
Every draft is approved by a person. Every assistant answer has a source. A month of observation.
Care
New categories, new documents, a review of the log, tweaks to the tone. Monthly, or when something changes.
Where the assistant gets its answers
An assistant that does not know the answer says “I do not know” and points to the person who does. That beats a confident answer made from nothing.
A documents assistant does not “know” anything by itself. It takes a question, searches the documents you have pointed it at, and answers from the passages it finds, citing the document and paragraph. If there are no passages, it should say so rather than fill in from general knowledge. That is a setting I test on the prototype with questions the documents do not answer.
The biggest job is usually on your side: deciding which documents are current. An assistant quoting a price list from two years ago does so with complete confidence. So the list of sources has an owner and a review date.
Questions about email and documents
Will AI send emails to our customers on its own?
Not at first. Every draft is approved by a person. After a month, for narrow categories with a high agreement rate (confirming an appointment, say), we can move to approving exceptions only. The decision is yours and can be reversed.
We have Microsoft 365 Copilot. Is that not enough?
For summaries and drafts in Outlook it often is, and then I start there. It is not enough when a reply has to pull data from the CRM, stick to specific documents or go through an approval queue. I check this on the first call.
What about personal data in emails?
I mask personal data before it goes to the model, or leave it in your systems and send only what the reply needs. I use business accounts with the vendors, with training switched off. The rules are in the article on what not to paste into AI.
Our procedures are out of date, or do not exist.
Then the assistant is a good excuse to write them. We start with the ten questions people ask most often and write down the answers. That is usually a day’s work on your side and the most valuable part of the whole project.
Can the same assistant answer customers on our website?
The mechanism is similar, but the sources, account and rules are different. I describe it separately on the page about website chat.
Is there a task someone at your company does by hand every week? Describe it in one sentence.
I reply within one business day. The first call is free of obligation.
Describe what you want automated
One sentence about the task is enough to start. You do not need to know the names of any tools. I reply within one business day.