HACKER Q&A
📣 devstein

What Happens When AI Is Emailing with AI?


Hey HN

Over the past few months, there have been countless GPT-powered products released in the past few months that help you automate personalized emails to thousands of unsuspecting recipients. Yet no one is talking about the people on the receiving end of those emails.

What happens when those recipients have AI email assistants responding to those AI-generated messages? I'm curious what people think this end state will look like. Some questions on my mind.

- Do the AI-assistants know their respective parties goals and only reach out to the human when necessary?

- Will email providers hide AI-to-AI conversations and only surface the end-state?

- Will there be regulatory disclosures required "this email is generated by AI" similar to requiring unsubscribe links on mailing lists?

- Will there be a single dominant AI assistant for all types of emails? Or specialized assistants for different types of emails (sales, recruiting, events, other solicitations)?

- Does the way we interact with email itself change? Does your inbox become more like a messaging app with different AI bots, similar to Slack or Discord?

- Does emailing become extremely terse and action oriented? i.e instead of an thank you email, you received a notification in your inbox saying "Sarah thank you for X"

What do you all think?

Disclosure:

My curiosity comes from actively working on a project in this problem space for recruiting, called SRC (https://sharedrecruiting.co). SRC goal is to promote transparent, collaborative communication by narrowing the tooling gap between candidates and companies. For candidates, this is an AI-powered career assistant in their inbox. For companies, it's an AI-powered sourcing sidekick. If this idea resonates, join the waitlist or reach out to me at devin at sharedrecruiting.co :)

  👤 JoeMayoBot Accepted Answer ✓
For several years, chatbots, which often use some form of AI, have been performing basic customer service tasks via chat interfaces, messaging, and email. It makes sense that they eventually improve over time, especially with the GPT-N and similar tools. A lot of people prefer interacting with chatbots/AI rather than humans because they never get frustrated, have an attitude, and respond efficiently (sometimes it sucks to deal with people). Despite all the hand wringing over how AI is emerging, I believe that it will become a useful tool that consumers and enterprise customers embrace.

Email is one channel that AI can communicate. It seems it might be more efficient to have a discovery protocol where they can communicate efficiently in a more peer-to-peer mode, rather than provisioning mailboxes and discovery bolted onto the side.

I'm looking at what's happening from the evolution of chatbots. We're just seeing a new generation of AI tools evolving. I'm only a single perspective, but it looks like it's evolving like any other new technology. Consider the PC wars, OS wars, browser wars, phone wars, and now the AI assistive technology wars. Microsoft and Google are stepping out early and I wouldn't be surprised if more emerged.