Maybe that title is hyperbolic in July 2026, but let’s give it time. In 2027 this bubble might have popped, or we (the US economy) might have so fully hitched our wagon to this software that the boll weevil looks like a mild risk in comparison.
Either way, my kids’ futures done been ‘et, and my present could be an appetizer.
See, I do a lot of email marketing. I spent a few years on just the writing and content planning side, and since 2024, I’ve also done everything short of server record management. From email template creation and maintenance in Pardot to planning out multi-touch sequences to nurture interest, I’m the one-stop-shop for email on our small team.
That’s why Google’s Gemini inbox, Microsoft’s inclusion of Copilot everywhere, and everyone else’s sudden embrace of agentic tools to manage their incoming email is really bugging me as both a marketing professional and a communication specialist.
Professional Issue: No Rulebook, No Playbook, Just a Matchbook
Everyone in tech likes to call their product disruptive. But if a tool or technology changes some fundamental truths, that’s more than disruption.
Adaptive spam filters and reputation scores were disruptive. They forced some good changes that were entirely in line with effective communication practices:
- Clear subject lines that had a content connection to the email body
- Email bodies that were long enough to contain actual information
- Links with human-readable targets
- Consistently sending messages people want to read
Disruptive changes might change some parts of the rulebook, like GDPR enforcing higher standards of privacy protection and respecting communication preferences, but the rulebook still exists. Communication playbooks might have to update their approach to individual tactics, but the strategy is still recognizable.
An autonomous, opaque software layer in the middle of a communication technology is not disruptive. It does not force good or useful adaptations. Two years after the earliest consumer tools were rolled out by Apple, email marketers are still trying to figure out what the tools are doing to marketing emails, if only to avoid an agent rewriting a promise to something that can’t be kept.
Communication Habitus Issue: no-reply@babeltower.org
Long before I worked in marketing, I taught technical and professional communication. In the early days of my career, educational CMSs were dodgy enough that I needed to create my own. To handle communication, I set up mail servers and email automations.
This was 2010. Hardly the early days of the internet, but still a very different world than today on the technical side.
Email protocols haven’t changed much since their creation in the 80s. Everything is additive and backward compatible. I can tell my AI assistant to use Gmail to send a message to a lab manager at Cal Tech who has had the same email address and CLI client for 40 years. That’s pretty impressive considering the fact that Android and Apple can’t agree on how to handle SMS.
But inserting a software layer in the middle that sorts, filters, prefetches, summarizes, and (in some cases) clicks emails breaks the assumptions we’ve always had about this channel of communication. It’s like asking my teenager to not just check if our mailbox has any envelopes, but also asking her to throw out anything she thinks is not worth my time, to open and read things that I might be interested in, and to preemptively respond to things before she carries anything into the house.
As a communicator, I can’t just rely on the norms of interpersonal communication to get my message to the recipient. There is now a wall between us that can’t be audited, error checked, or directly configured. Early versions had to be activated or run manually, but current tools are part of the inbox’s basic functionality.
Email is just one channel for communication, but schools, government orgs, businesses, and community groups use it as the official channel for information. As we are able to rely less and less on this channel faithfully delivering our text to our audience–or delivering their message to us unchanged–where do we turn next?
