This is Culture & Code, a newsletter and podcast about Creativity and Artificial Intelligence. Culture & Code explores innovation across storytelling, technology and audiences to help creative professionals collaborate better with AI and each other.
Will There be the AI Equivalent of Email?
Good old email, we hardly knew ye.
That’s a tag line in a lot of articles about how AI will usher in the age of multi-modal, multi-lingual, multi-WTF-ever communication between people and organizations.
To be sure, getting rid of email is seductive. After all, who hasn’t cussed at their inbox filling up, a bulging spam folder, part 82 of an email thread or — especially — that colleague who uses “Reply All” as their default setting.
Irritation notwithstanding, I’m betting email will stick around far longer than most tech analysts predict. Trillions of emails sent and received add up to a lot of inertia. People get the value proposition of sending mail without licking the stamp. The name says it all.
John Gauntt with Midjourney 2024
Email is asynchronous. You can blow off an email with more plausible deniability than you can blow off messages reaching you on Discord, Slack or any other real-time platform. “I didn’t receive your message. Can you send it again?” “Oh, I’m sorry, your email ended up in my Spam folder.” There have been more than a few people who salvaged valuable time to think through a sticky situation with those time honored excuses.
I’m not saying Email equals Magna Carta. Certainly, there will be 23rd and 24th century historians wading through the muck of 20th and 21st century email correspondence similar to those who translated cuneiform writing discovered that grocery lists rather than poetry constituted the bulk of the first human writing.
That said, there’s something to the idea that gaps of time to respond (however received culturally) are things that people want to keep. This radical expansion of the present tense through real-time, on-demand technology is becoming white noise. Without pausing to think, we enter further into the land of default settings — in our minds.
If AI is going to replace email, it needs to help people think through better responses rather than just react. Sometimes more efficiency is not what we need.
Interview with Shira Simmonds, Founder of SmartReach AI
This week’s conversation is with Shira Simmonds, the CEO of SmartReach AI and SSC-Digital. We cover B2B email marketing in the age of AI. Specifically, we examined the workflows for researching and crafting personalized email at scale for B2B lead generation. Then we turned to how AI changes the game, plus where the human touch will always be best. One area of particular interest is how AI rebalances where you invest and the talent you bring into an organization.
Listen to the full interview (29min) HERE.
Coming Soon to the Culture & Code Podcast & Newsletter
1.) One of LA’s top AI Community Leaders speaks with Culture & Code
2.) Let’s talk about AI Film Festivals — the good, bad and ugly.