Nobody is reading emails anymore

If you are working for a company with an AI budget the most trendiest thing to do to be productive is using agents. Irrespective of the provider what they all do is some sort of an automation. Making the computer do repeatitive/mundane tasks or outsourcing to find time do tasks that require human intelligence is not a new concept.

It is incredibly common to look at what AI is doing today and realize that much of it could have been done years ago using traditional automation tools like Excel macros, basic scripting, or built-in software rules (you have already paid for the feature, therefore this is still the cheapest and most reliable). There are a few big reasons why people didn't use pre-AI automation, and why AI suddenly made it happen:

The "Blank Page" Interface: Pre-AI automation required knowing how to build it. You had to understand logic (If/Then), syntax, or navigate complex user interfaces. AI replaced that with natural language. If you can describe what you want in plain English, you can automate it.

Data was too messy: Old-school automation is brittle. If a data format changes by one comma or a web page moves a button, the whole script breaks. AI acts as a "buffer" that can handle messy, unstructured data (like an email chain or a poorly formatted PDF) without breaking.

The Awareness Gap: Many people simply didn't know what was possible. AI has brought automation into the mainstream conversation, making people look at their daily friction points through a new lens.

Email marketers must completely shift their strategy. As AI assistants (like Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot) increasingly preview, summarise, and filter inboxes, the primary audience for your email is no longer just a human—it is an AI gatekeeper. If an AI summarises your beautiful, image-heavy newsletter as "Marketing promotion offering a discount on shoes," your click-through rates will plummet.

Traditional marketing relies on curiosity gaps (e.g., Subject: "You won't believe what's inside..."). AI destroys curiosity gaps by scanning the inside of the email and telling the user what it is anyway.

Be Direct: If your subject line is vague, but the AI summary says "Standard weekly sales pitch," the user won't open it.

Optimize for Intent: Write subject lines and intros that match clear user intents (e.g., "Account Update," "Event Details," "Exclusive Member Discount"). AI is more likely to flag these as important.

Schema: If your email contains an event, a booking, or a receipt, make that data incredibly easy for an AI to parse so it can add it to the user's calendar or expense tracker (see schema.org). Create a clean, isolated text summarising the Who, What, When, and Where in plain text.

B2B vs B2C: Because AI treats emails differently based on user behavior, you have to optimize for two distinct AI "mindsets". In B2B, the AI is an Executive Assistant trying to save the user time by filtering out noise. In B2C, the AI is a Personal Shopping Assistant trying to organize deals, track packages, and find coupons.

That is all I had for this post. As always thank you very much for visiting my blog. Final piece of advice. If you are using an agent to read your email please also make sure you have another filtering for scam, phishing, and viruses. Unfortunately, agents have created a new attack vector for bad actors. Don't forget to check with IT/Security of your company before giving an agent access to your email.