AI in email; can this save us 3 months a year?

I experimented with writing an email with AI, Chat Gpt to be exact. In my experience writing emails can take up loads of time. The average professional spends 28% of their time reading and answering emails (Plummer, 2019). This translates to almost 2,5 hours per day, which translates to a work week in a month and 3 months per year reading emails! I believe that AI can be of great value here. Writing emails not only takes up a large amount of time, but they can be creatively draining. Writing emails is a very repetitive task, and mental capacity can be freed up by AI. In my experience it is especially useful when you do not have a clear structure for your email yet, and you want some help with this. You do, however, need to have some sort of inspiration for your email, then it works best. By feeding the AI your target audience and the main message you want the other person to receive, the results are, in my opinion, the best and most accurate. Many other students on this platform have mentioned the inaccuracy of AI, however, for email this is not such a problem. This is because (most) emails do not have to be perfect, and we are used to seeing mistakes in this form of communication.

While using Chat Gpt, I also experienced that there can be some drawbacks for using AI to generate your emails. Using an AI will likely lead to longer emails than necessary, transferring the burden to the addressed person in your email. In a society where we are already spending too much time on email, I am quite sure that this is not a desired result. This could be solved by limiting the AI in its generating capabilities (e.g. max 100 words), but this is an active decision that needs to be made by the user. Furthermore, it can be quite dangerous for more serious or sensitive issues. The danger is that you are no longer used to writing emails, and lack the skills to write a proficient email in a short amount of time when you have to. Moreover, there is the more broad issue with data security, as the AI likely uses your data and input to improve the AI, so for sensitive issues this might not be the best course of action. 

In an ideal world, I would propose a solution where we skip the formalities of emails, and make a standard of writing clear and concise email, without any unnecessary words, sentences or formalities. This will increase the amount of time we have for useful tasks, resulting in a better quality of work, more meaningful tasks which has been linked to increased employee satisfaction. That way we do not have to spend a large part of our adult life on the mailing interface, which is something I do not look forward to. 

Plummer, M. (2019, January 22). How to Spend Way Less Time on Email Every Day. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/01/how-to-spend-way-less-time-on-email-every-day