I Let AI Run My Inbox for a Month. It Was Fine, Mostly.
An experiment in handing my email to an assistant bot, and the two moments it almost got me fired.
I have 14,000 unread emails. Not a metaphor. So when a friend dared me to point an AI assistant at the whole mess, I said yes mostly out of shame.
Week one was magical. It sorted, it triaged, it drafted replies that sounded exactly like me, which was unsettling. I caught up on a backlog that had been quietly embarrassing me for two years.
Then it almost sent a snarky draft to a client. The model had read the tone of our banter and decided the client email was also banter. It was not. I caught it with two seconds to spare.
The second near-disaster was an invoice it marked "not urgent" because the wording was polite. Polite does not mean unbilled.
Verdict: AI is a great first pass and a terrible final one. I still use it every day. I just never let it hit send on anything with a name on it.