Sorting and summarising email with AI

A full inbox eats time, mostly in reading and deciding what comes first. AI can do that groundwork: summarise long emails, sort a pile by action and prepare a first reply. You still make the decisions.

Three ways to start

1. Summarise one long email or thread. Paste the email or the whole thread and ask: what's being asked, by whom, by when, and what's already been decided? With long reply-all threads, it saves a lot of reading.

2. Sort a pile. Copy the subject lines and first lines of twenty emails and ask the AI to group them: reply today, this week, for information, can be deleted. You get a list you can check in seconds.

3. AI inside your email. In Outlook with Copilot or Gmail with Gemini, depending on your licence, you can ask for a summary or draft reply directly. Nothing to copy, and the data stays in your business environment.

A fixed set of categories helps

Agree a fixed set of categories, for yourself or your team, and use it in every request. For example:

• Action today: customers with a problem, payments, deadlines.
• Action this week: quote requests, meetings to schedule.
• For information: newsletters, copies, notifications.
• Forward: questions that belong with a colleague.

The more consistent the categories, the more reliable the result and the faster you can check it.

Watch out for

• Sensitive emails: HR matters, medical information or contracts don't go into a personal AI account. Use a business account or leave them out.
• The small print: a summary can miss a detail, such as an attachment, a condition or a date in the last sentence. For important emails, read the original yourself.
• Nothing sent automatically: let AI draft, but send yourself.

A realistic goal

Don't start with your whole inbox. Pick one moment a day, say first thing in the morning, and have AI summarise and sort the overnight emails. After two weeks you'll know whether it saves time and which categories work for you.

Checklist

Prompt to copy