Email is becoming less of a communication tool and more of an organizational memory system.
TL;DR: AI agents are increasingly reading, summarizing, retrieving, and acting on email before humans do. That changes email’s function, its audience, and eventually the role communication plays at work.
Tom Fishburne’s “AI Written, AI Read” cartoon captures the emerging absurdity perfectly: one AI expands a simple thought into an email. At the same time, another AI condenses it back into the original thought.
For nearly fifty years, email has served as a digital replacement for letters and memos. We write messages, send them to people, and expect those people to read, interpret, and respond. But the primary reader is beginning to change. Many people, including me, now use AI to summarize inboxes, prioritize messages, draft responses, extract commitments, schedule meetings, and surface action items.
The email itself has not changed. Its function and audience have.
Email is becoming a record of organizational decisions, approvals, obligations, and context. AI can now interpret that record at scale. Instead of asking a colleague to find and forward an email from six months ago, we can ask an agent:
“Summarize every discussion we have had about this idea, identify the commitments we made, and tell me what remains unresolved.”
That shift means we are increasingly writing for two audiences: the human recipient and the AI systems that may later retrieve, categorize, summarize, and reason over the message.
Good workplace writing may therefore become more structurally explicit: clear decisions, named owners, specific deadlines, linked context, visible assumptions.
The inbox may disappear before email does.
A significant share of workplace email exists primarily to coordinate people and activities:
“Any updates?”
“Following up.”
“Just checking.”
“Circling back.”
“A friendly reminder…”
As agents become better at tracking shared work, some of this coordination may no longer require a message at all.
What remains human is not simply the transmission of facts. It is negotiation, coaching, conflict resolution, persuasion, trust building, and the creation of shared meaning.
The broader question is not whether AI will help us write more email. It is what human work becomes when we spend less time sending, receiving, forwarding, summarizing, and searching for information.
Our roles may shift from carrying information through the organization to interpreting it, exercising judgment, and helping people decide what to do next.
#FutureOfWork #ArtificialIntelligence #OrganizationalDesign #KnowledgeManagement #AgenticAI
