How we automated our inbox

The problem

About 370 email threads land in our inbox in a typical week. We counted one week in October 2026. They’re a mix of client questions, support requests, call bookings, invoices, newsletters and notifications from the tools we use.

Almost every one needs a small decision: reply, do something, wait for someone, file it or just read it. At around 30 seconds a thread, making those decisions by hand comes to about three hours a week.

The bigger cost was checking. We were opening the inbox more than ten times a day in case something urgent had come in, and every check pulls you out of whatever you were doing. Research by Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found it takes an average of 23 minutes to get fully back into a task after an interruption (Fast Company (opens in a new tab)). Even if you allow just five minutes to refocus after each check, that’s over four hours a week.

What we built

An AI assistant, built on Claude, with access to our Gmail and our support help desk. Its job is to sort, file and tell us what needs us, so we can deal with the most urgent things when we need to and pick up the less urgent ones when we have a bit more time. The inbox stops being something we have to keep watching.

How it works

1. It reads the new email. It picks up the messages that have come in since it last ran.
2. It gives each thread one next step. There are seven: Urgent, Manual review, Reply, Do, Waiting, File and Read. It also adds labels for which client or area of work the thread belongs to, so it can be found later.
3. It says how sure it is. Each decision gets a confidence score. If it’s less than 80% sure, the thread goes to Manual review instead. It asks rather than guesses.
4. It watches for tricks. Some emails are written to fool an AI into doing something it shouldn’t, known as prompt injection. The assistant flags anything that looks like that instead of acting on it.
5. It clears the inbox. Sorted threads are archived. Nothing is deleted: the labels mean every thread is one click away.
6. It sends a report. Every hour a summary arrives: each next step with how many messages are unread, how many there are in total and how many are new, plus the open conversations in our support inbox.

What went wrong at first

It wasn’t right first time, and the two early mistakes are worth knowing about if you’re thinking of building something similar.

• Threads got more than one next step. An email might be marked both Reply and Do, which defeats the point of a single list to work from. The fix was a hard rule: exactly one next step per thread.
• New call bookings weren’t treated as urgent. A booking for a call later that same day could sit under Read, because on the face of it the email didn’t ask for anything. Now any new booking for the next day or so always goes to Urgent.

Both were fixed by tightening the instructions, not by adding more technology. That’s typical: most of the work in an AI automation is deciding the rules your business actually runs on and writing them down clearly.

What it saves

We estimate it saves at least 7 hours a week for each person whose inbox it looks after. That’s about three hours of sorting by hand, plus at least four hours of lost focus from checking the inbox ten or more times a day. It’s an estimate, not a measurement, and we’ve kept it on the cautious side.

The bigger change is harder to put a number on. Instead of opening the inbox to see whether anything has gone wrong, we glance at one short report, and urgent things are at the top of it.

Could this work for you?

If your inbox doubles as your to-do list, probably. It suits any business where enquiries, bookings, supplier emails and client questions all arrive in the same place and someone has to decide what each one needs.

A version for your business would start with the same questions we answered for ours: what your next steps are, what counts as urgent for you, who should be asked when it isn’t sure, and where the report should go. That could be Slack, Microsoft Teams, a message to your phone or a plain email. It works with any email: Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365 or any other provider.