Your inbox is the AI interface you’re not using

Every few months there’s a new AI tool for founders, and every one of them is another tab to check. I’ve ended up somewhere less exciting and, I think, more useful: the best place for an AI assistant to work is the inbox you already have open.

Email already does the hard parts of keeping a person in the loop. A draft is a proposal that hasn’t gone anywhere. You can read it, change a word, send it or bin it, and nothing reaches a customer until you press send. There’s no new habit, no new login and no dashboard. You open your email, and the replies are waiting.

Email also keeps the record for you. The thread holds the context: what the customer asked last time, what you promised, how you spoke to them. The sent folder holds what actually went out. And the difference between the draft and what you sent is the most honest measure I know of how well an assistant is doing. If you send a kind of reply untouched, week after week, that’s evidence. If you rewrite the same paragraph every time, that’s evidence too, and it tells me exactly what to fix.

There are risks, and they’re worth being plain about. Emails contain instructions written by other people, and some are written to manipulate. An assistant that reads your inbox has to treat every incoming message as information, never as an order. The ones I build draft. By default they don’t send, forward, pay or delete, and attachments and anything sensitive always wait for a person.

None of this is glamorous. It’s a draft in a folder. But for a founder who answers customers, stockists and suppliers all day, a well-made draft that knows your voice and your limits is worth more than another clever app, because you’ll actually use it.

The best interface is the one you already have open.