Email Is the G.O.A.T. | Why AI Will Never Replace Business Email
Not many people know this, but the only reason I got into IT is because a guy who I had a crush on back in 1994 told me to get email. I thought he was ridiculous, why on earth would I need email when we talked on the phone ten times a day. He said it was cool. I didn’t care; I didn’t need a computer. I worked on an old green screen mainframe doing 411 at the phone company. After work, I wanted to party, not be a nerd. Two years later, I finally went to college and got email and then I learned I actually was a computer nerd. And I emailed him. We actually quit talking on the phone after I started school but did email here and there. He sent me a virtual floral bouquet on Valentine’s Day in 1997. I will never forget how that made me feel. I believe it was that day when I fell in love with email and now almost 30 years later, I still love it. I’m 57 and know I will retire working on the emailsphere somehow. No matter what happens with Outlook.
There are reasons for this article. I have had fears AI is going to take away my consulting business. AI is always trying to budge in line. It might take over some of my work, but now I’m going to tell you many reasons here why I feel AI is never going to kill email. I feel a bit more confident with my career choice.
- People love communicating with email. It’s easy, no long phone conversations, get to the point, fast reply, fast send, instant gratification. As a person in business, emails mean money and most of my clients are in business, so email is money to them as well. Money is exciting, money keeps us going in business, email is that communicator of the joy of running our businesses.
- Email is an important part of running a business, first sale emails, quotes, proposals, SOW’s, invoices, receipts, everything we do is sent through email. While AI might be a practical function doing the work, it’s all still sent via email.
- People love everything email can do. Send links, attachments, pictures, video and practically any type of file. Anyone on a computer or phone can open it.
- People need an email account to set up anything online. Any decent account that is. Sure, a phone number could replace this, but I don’t think it will be soon.
- Email is a great time killer. Waiting at the Dr office? Go check your email. Organize your email on a long flight. Pretend you’re busy doing something important “I can’t talk I have to get this email out”.
- Email is one of the only human connections that business folks can use across any platform. The one place that every technology platform gets along.
- Email is searchable and offers many different variables to search your inbox. I have yet to see AI do the major email search kung-fu my clients do.
- Email is a documentation system that holds records. Every email we receive and send is important for historical reference. “Oh, I have that email from 2017 that says this mattress is covered” even if you lost the 10-year warranty login link online or forgot where you even bought that mattress. You know email is your trusted source.
- Email keeps track of conversations.
- Email is free storage for your brain. I delete so many emails now because I know I can just search for anything from today to back when I started this email. Think I can’t find it? I’ll find it.
- Email is reliable. If someone says, “Oh I didn’t get your email”, it’s a deliverability issue or they didn’t see it in their inbox. I tend to lean to the latter, but that’s just to add humor to the story.
- Email archiving is important for legal reasons; email discovery is important for winning legal matters. I have found many missing emails in my day that saved a client from losing a case.
- Email can prove you haven’t completely lost your memory, “I emailed that to you six months ago”. If they need proof, happily forward the sent email. This is one of my favorites when people didn’t reply to me.
- Businesses can conduct outside business easily. Only using Teams, Discord or Slack can cause customers to not enjoy working with you. Email is perfect for cross platform use.
- Email is open 24×7. You can do emails at night and not bother someone. If someone doesn’t like receiving your emails at 2:00 am, they should not be checking email at 2:00 am.
- Email is where business and sales get done. No one wants to buy from AI. We all already had it with chatbots and AI agents. People are judgey about this and they want to work with a human. We already have to push 19 buttons on the phone and scream “AGENT” loudly to get a human, email using AI doesn’t understand the exclamation mark, or ALL CAPPING.
- Email has a tone with it; you can tell when you’re talking to someone who is relaxed and cool or upset and wanting attention now. Emails get us to react as people and we have to deal with people to make decisions.
- Email has a level of trust that comes along with it. If you email a CEO of a company and get an automated response, we all just delete it and go on. If we get a real email from the CEO, we know we had to take a couple of minutes of their time for them to reply. We have some trust that something got read, and action might take place, good or bad. AI email automated responses never seem to get anything accomplished.
- Finally, how else are we going to reset our passwords? Phone yes, apps maybe but email is most likely going to be the place to do it. Just my theories~
I hope you enjoy this article. AI is going to be a part of our tech world no matter what. I have faith in people that we will always want to have a human connection for communications. Thirty years ago that cute guy convinced me to finally get an email account and that was probably the best advice technology advice I’ve ever received.
Keep on emailin’.
Lisa, your favorite Outlook gal
