What AI Can and Can't Do With a Shared Business Inbox

AI in an inbox does four main jobs: it sorts, it summarises, it drafts, and it searches. It doesn't run your business. A person still reads anything that matters and presses send.

What the tools say they do

The makers describe it in plain terms. Google says Gemini in Gmail can help you do things like these:

• Boil a long thread down to a few bullet points.¹
• Write a new email, or polish a draft you've started.¹
• Tidy up in bulk, for example by adding labels to several messages at once.¹

Microsoft's page covers its Copilot app. A chat prompt there can read, draft and summarise shared-mailbox emails. You need a Copilot licence.²

That's a list of tasks, not a promise of quality. The tools do the first pass. You check the result.

Where a person is still needed

Australia's privacy regulator warns that AI systems can produce results that are inaccurate or false.³ A summary can leave out the one line that matters, such as a customer saying they'll cancel. A draft can promise a refund your policy doesn't allow.

The same regulator says to think about how people will oversee the tool before you adopt it.³ For a shared inbox, that means deciding in advance who reads what.

Who this suits

A team with a steady stream of similar questions has more to gain from sorting and drafting help. A business with a few messages a day may do fine with plain folders and filters. The page on simple inbox rules covers that option.

A business that handles sensitive customer details has an extra step. Read customer emails and privacy before connecting any tool to the inbox.

A sensible starting rule

Let AI suggest, never send. Keep the human step for anything that involves money, a complaint, a legal threat, a health detail or a deadline. Add automation only for low-risk work, such as labelling newsletters, and look at the results every week or so.

The next pages take each job in turn. Start with sorting and labels. Then try urgent mail, and last, reply drafts.

Be wary of any tool that promises to run the inbox alone. Nothing here backs that up. The makers' own pages describe help with tasks, with the person still in charge.