Can AI change the way we consume email?

This week, I stumbled across Shortwave, a tool that touts an intelligent way to ingest email, powered by AI. With the goal of getting to #inboxzero, Shortwave claims that they help sort, summarize, and triage emails automatically to hopefully get me closer to less emails in my inbox.

As an email marketer, I want subscribers to be genuinely interested in consuming my content. If subscribers feel the need to require AI to digest the content I send, or explain it further, I feel like I’m not doing a great job.

I’m excited to see how Shortwave takes emails I’ve created as an email marketer and makes them easier to “consume”.

Reviewing Shortwave

You are first prompted to customize your inbox (essentially determine what groups your emails are sorted into). For marketers concerned about the Gmail Promotions tab, wait until you see how many groupings Shortwave has!

You’re then asked what types of email you want to receive push notifications for. Because I’m testing Shortwave on web, I was further prompted to enable web push after enabling this setting for Finance emails. Despite enabling the feature, I never officially was prompted to opt-into web-push officially by Chrome, so I don’t think this step worked correctly.

Right now, I’m wondering if this is just another inbox organization tool and not a tool that will drastically make consuming content easier.

Summarizing Email Content

I decided to take the AI feature for a spin, and allow it to summarize an email I sent earlier today. Parcel (me as an email marketer), Naomi (me as an end-subscriber)

The image reads “Parcel sent an email newsletter featuring tips and tools for email, including a new Type E exploring how to improve alt text to meet WCAG standards. Naomi was asked to reply if they had something cool to share. Peaberry Software Inc. was mentioned at the end, and Naomi was asked to unsubscribe from all Parcel emails.”

Okay, a bit weird of an ending on the summary. I’d be surprised if it referenced the standard “unsubscribe” listed in hopefully every marketing email out there. It also referenced the official sender address listed in the footer - Peaberry Software Inc — and I don’t think this mention from Shortwave did anything for me as an end subscriber. What value do I get from that?

Want to see the email in question?

So although summarizing email has gone in the classic “well, thanks AI” direction where it somewhat missed the mark, I am still interested in the triaging process. Shortwave has grouped all my “promotional” emails over the past 7-days, and since the Shortwave method is to encourage individuals to get to inbox zero, I’m encouraged to either delete, or mark emails as “done”.

This is a personal thing, but since I can’t find a way to mark them all as done, I don’t necessarily want to spend my afternoon going through them all individually. A tool like Shortwave might be best when you’re starting an inbox FROM inbox zero, and want to maintain it that way, but it feels a tad overwhelming to tackle when you are starting at inbox one-million and want to make things more digestable. Clearly a me problem.

And that’s it. That was all I pretty much found from this tool.

What do we really need from our inboxes?

Easier ways to consume content. Quicker ways to get to call’s to action.

People hate on Gmail’s idea of tabs quite a lot. But they are moving toward bringing email content directly into the feed view, which elimates hoops that need to be jumped through. If I can see a discount code, expiry date, and key information about email content without needing to click into it, that’s a win for me as an end user.

As an email marketer, although it’s getting more difficult to track the impact of an email thanks to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection, ad blockers, and overall a more crowded inbox, I’m okay with these changes if people can consume my content easier.

It also just means that I need to become more creative with the channels I use in tandem to email, and how I use them.