Email came with the promise<\/a> of efficiency, clarity and less friction in organisational communication. Instead, for many, it has morphed into something else: always there<\/a>, near impossible to escape and sometimes simply overwhelming<\/a>. <\/p>\n Right now, something is shifting again. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot<\/a>, is increasingly allowing people to offload the repetitive routines of tending one\u2019s inbox \u2013 drafting, summarising and replying. <\/p>\n My colleagues in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society<\/a> found 45.6% of Australians<\/a> have recently used a generative AI tool, 82.6% of those using it for text generation. A healthy chunk of that use likely includes email.<\/p>\n So, what happens if we end up fully automating one of the staples of the white-collar daily grind? Will AI technologies reduce some of the friction, or generate new forms of it<\/a>? Dare I ask \u2013 are we actually about to get more email?<\/p>\n Why the printer isn\u2019t dead yet<\/p>\n Soon after the advent of email, some voices in the business world heralded the coming end of paper use<\/a> in the office. That didn\u2019t happen. If you work in an office today, there\u2019s a good chance you still have a printer. <\/p>\n In their 2001 book, The Myth of the Paperless Office<\/a>, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper show how digital tools rarely eliminate older forms of work. Instead, they reshape them. <\/p>\n Sellen and Harper show how paper use didn\u2019t disappear with the rise of email and other digital communication tools; in many cases, it intensified. The takeaway isn\u2019t that offices failed to modernise, but rather that work reorganised around what these new tools could do.<\/p>\n In this case, paper persisted not only out of habit, but because of what it affords: it is easy to annotate, spread out, carry and view at a glance. This was all too clunky (or impossible) to perform via the digital alternatives. <\/p>\n At the same time, email and digitisation dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing communication. It was far easier to send more messages, to more people, more often.<\/p>\n Circling back to today<\/p>\n Will AI be different? If early signs are anything to go by, the answer is: not in the way we might hope<\/a>. <\/p>\n Like earlier waves of workplace technology, AI is less likely to replace existing communication practices than to intensify them \u2013 but at least it might come with better grammar<\/a> and a suspiciously upbeat tone<\/a>. <\/p>\n Some new AI tools offer to manage your inbox entirely, feeding into broader privacy concerns<\/a> about the technology.<\/p>\n At this moment, what a lot of these products seem to offer is not an escape from email, but a smoothing of its rough edges. Workers are using AI to soften otherwise blunt requests, modify their tone or expand what might otherwise be considered too brief a response.<\/p>\n Rather than removing the need to communicate, these tools offer pathways to make a delicate performance easier.<\/p>\n What email is actually for<\/p>\n Email, like many forms of communication, is as much about maintaining everyday relationships<\/a> as it is about the transfer of information.<\/p>\n At work, it\u2019s often about<\/a> signalling competence, responsiveness, collegiality and authority. \u201cJust looping someone in\u201d or \u201ccircling back\u201d are all part of our absurd office vocabulary, a shared dialect that helps us navigate hierarchy, soften demands and keep things moving \u2013 all without saying what we really think.<\/p>\n If AI lowers the effort required to produce these signals, it won\u2019t necessarily reduce their importance, but it could unsettle things in rather odd ways.<\/p>\n If more people use AI to draft emails they don\u2019t particularly want to write, we end up with a game of bureaucratic \u201cmime\u201d: everyone performing sincerity and quietly outsourcing it, and no one entirely sure how much of their inbox was actually written by a human. <\/p>\n The labour of email was never just about crafting sentences<\/a>. It\u2019s always been the scanning, the sorting and the deciding. AI doesn\u2019t remove this burden. If anything, it amplifies it.<\/p>\n When everything arrives polished, everything looks important. That points to a deeper question for the future of work: if AI can perform responsiveness, why are we generating so many situations that still require it?<\/p>\n
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