AI for Email: How to Respond Faster Without Sounding Like a Robot

A colleague recently forwarded me an email she'd received from a vendor. "Does this seem weird to you?" she asked. I read it and immediately knew what she meant. The email was perfectly professional—too perfect. Every sentence was grammatically flawless, structurally predictable, and utterly devoid of personality. It felt like corresponding with a very polite wall.

"They're using AI," I said. She nodded. "I know. And now I don't trust anything they write."

This is the trap. AI can absolutely help you handle email faster—the average professional spends over eleven hours a week on it—but the obvious approach of letting AI write everything creates a different problem. You save time but damage relationships. The goal isn't to automate email; it's to automate the tedious parts while keeping the human parts human.

The Tasks AI Actually Helps With

After two years of experimenting, I've found AI genuinely useful for email in specific, bounded ways. Not as a replacement for thinking, but as a tool for the mechanical parts of the work.

Drafting the Routine Stuff

Some emails are genuinely formulaic: meeting confirmations, standard information requests, simple acknowledgments. These don't need creative thought—they need correct information in a reasonable format. AI handles this well.

The key is being specific about what you need. A vague "write a reply to this" produces generic output. A specific prompt produces something useful:

That last instruction matters. AI has favourite phrases that instantly signal "this was machine-generated." Learning to exclude them makes the output less obviously artificial.

Summarising Thread Disasters

You know the experience: you return from a day off to find a 47-message thread with six participants, three changed decisions, and no clear conclusion. Reading it all would take thirty minutes. Understanding it would take longer.

This is where AI genuinely shines. Paste the entire thread and ask for specifics:

Five minutes later, you understand the thread better than most of the participants do.

Improving Your Own Writing

This might be the highest-value use case, and it's the one people underutilise. Instead of having AI write for you, write yourself—quickly, roughly—then use AI to improve it.

Your rough draft contains your actual thoughts, your real intentions, your natural voice. AI can tighten the language, fix unclear sections, adjust the tone, or restructure for clarity. The result sounds like you, but better—not like a robot pretending to be you.

The Improvement Workflow

1

Write Rough

Get your thoughts down without worrying about polish. Two minutes, stream of consciousness.

2

Ask for Improvements

"Make this more concise" or "adjust the tone to be more diplomatic" or "clarify the third paragraph"

3

Review and Adjust

The output is a suggestion, not a final product. Take what works, discard what doesn't.

Handling the Difficult Ones

We've all been there: an email arrives that makes your blood pressure spike. A complaint, an unfair criticism, a passive-aggressive message from someone who knows exactly what they're doing. Your instinct is to fire back immediately. This is almost always a mistake.

AI is useful here precisely because it has no emotions. Paste the offending email, explain what you want to convey, and ask for a measured, professional response. The AI draft gives you a starting point that's diplomatic when you're not capable of diplomacy yourself.

I still edit these heavily—the AI doesn't know the relationship history or the political context—but starting from a calm draft is easier than starting from anger.

Where AI Makes Things Worse

Not every email task benefits from AI. Some actively suffer from it.

A Realistic Daily Workflow

Here's how this actually looks in practice. Not a theoretical framework—what I actually do each day:

Morning triage happens without AI. I scan my inbox to understand what's there: what's urgent, what can wait, what needs thought. This takes five minutes and gives me a mental map of the day's communication needs.

Quick replies I write myself. Anything under three sentences doesn't benefit from AI involvement. "Thanks, confirmed." "Tuesday works, see you then." "Good question—let me check and get back to you." These take seconds to type and maintain the natural rhythm of human correspondence.

Longer emails get AI assistance. Anything requiring more than a paragraph, I'll either draft rough and ask for improvements, or describe what I need and work from the AI's draft. Either way, I'm editing before sending.

Every email gets a final read. No exceptions. I read it as if I'm the recipient, asking: does this sound like me? Would I be happy receiving this? Is there anything that feels off?

Time saved: roughly 30-45 minutes per day. That's three to four hours a week reclaimed, without anyone noticing a change in how my emails feel.

Warning Signs You've Gone Too Far

It's easy to over-rely on AI once you see how much time it saves. Watch for these signals:

People ask if you're using AI. If someone mentions it, you've already lost the game. The whole point is that they shouldn't notice.

Replies become more transactional. When relationships start feeling more like exchanges of information and less like conversations, something's missing.

You can't remember what you wrote. If you're sending emails without engaging with their content, you're not communicating—you're just moving messages from inbox to sent.

If any of these sound familiar, dial back the AI and invest more personal attention. The time savings aren't worth it if they cost you relationships.

The Real Point

Email exists to serve relationships, not the other way around. When we optimise email purely for efficiency, we risk treating human connections as problems to be processed rather than relationships to be nurtured.

AI is a tool for handling the mechanical overhead of email—the formatting, the routine confirmations, the tedious summaries—so you can invest more attention in the messages that actually matter. Used well, it doesn't make your emails less human; it frees you to be more human where it counts.

The goal isn't to remove yourself from your inbox. It's to spend less time on email mechanics so you can spend more time on the people your emails connect you to.