It is a lot cheaper to leverage existing user interfaces & tools (i.e., Outlook) than it is to build new UIs and then train users on them.
It's kind of like sure, I could manage my own emails, or I could offset this to someone who does it better. If you do it better and it's affordable, I'm in.
We are on that starship to the future right now and I love it.
If you don't need to have the lowest possible latency for your work and you're happy to have threads die then it's better than any bespoke solution you can build without an army of engineers to keep it chugging along.
What's even better is that you can see all the context, and use the same command plane as the agents to tell them what they are doing wrong.
text + attachments into the system, text + attachments out
My finance guy, tax attorney, other attorneys. Send emails, get emails, occasionally a blind status update from them.
Sure, we have phone calls, sometimes get together for lunch.
But mostly it’s just emails.
I am still very open to this one. An email-based, artificial coworker is so obviously the right way to penetrate virtually every B2B market in existence.
I don't even really want to touch the technology aspects. Writing code that integrates with an LLM provider and a mailbox in E365 or Gmail is boring. The schema is a grand total of ten tables if we're being pedantic about things.
Working with prospects and turning them into customers is a way more interesting problem. I hunger for tangible use cases that are actually compatible with this shiny new LLM tooling. We all know they're out there, and email is probably the lowest friction way to get them applied to most businesses.
Agreed. That's also the hardest part, and where most value is created.
I could see installing or implementing a custom client if there were some functionality that'd enable, but "support a conversation among two speakers" is something computers have done since well before I was born. If the wheel fits, why reinvent it?
If I'm building myself a toy, then sure, I can implement whatever I want for a client, if that's where I get my jollies. React Native isn't hard but it is often annoying, and the fun for me in this project would be all in the conversation with the agent per se. Whatever doesn't get me to that as fast as possible is just getting in my way, you know?
And too, if this does turn out to be something that actually works well for me, then I'm going to want to integrate it with my phone's voice assistant, and at that point an app is required anyway - but if I start with a protocol and an app that that assistant already knows how to interact with, then again I have an essentially free if admittedly very imperfect prototype.
Receiving an email from the AI-butler rescheduling or relocating a planned outdoors family event because rain is expected would be excellent, using IMAP to wire-up the subcomponents together would not.
We're talking about a conversation that has a human on at least one end, so email makes sense. For conversations involving no humans, of course there are much better stores and protocols if something like an asynchronous world-writable queue is what we want.
"Number of humans in the conversation" wasn't the distinction you initially established, I believe, but I wonder if it's closer to the one you had in mind.