Guide
Automating email triage with AI
When a shared inbox is sorted by hand, every email waits for someone to read it, decide what it is and pass it on. AI can do that first pass in seconds. Done well, every email arrives with a topic, a priority and an owner, and routine questions get answered without anyone touching them.
What AI triage does
For each incoming email, the system decides:
- What it's about: billing, a bug, a booking change, a sales enquiry…
- How urgent it is, based on the content and the sender
- What happens next: answer, forward, create a ticket, schedule a meeting
- Who owns it: a team or a specific person
Start with how email is handled today
Take a few hundred recent emails and sort them by hand once: which categories exist, who handled them, how quickly. That gives you the categories and routing rules the AI should follow, and a test set to check its accuracy before it goes live.
Skipping this step is the most common reason triage projects stall: the categories don't match how the team actually works.
Automate in stages
- Tag and route first. It's low risk, and the team sees the benefit immediately
- Draft answers to routine questions from your knowledge base, with a person approving them
- Send routine answers automatically once the drafts are consistently right
- Add escalation rules for important senders and urgent topics, so they never wait in the queue
Keep a person in the loop where it matters
Not every email should be answered by AI. Complaints, legal topics and anything involving money usually need a person. The goal is that your team spends its time on those emails, instead of sorting the rest.
What to measure
- Time from arrival to first response
- Share of emails routed to the right owner the first time
- Share of routine questions answered without a person
- Mis-tagged emails: review them weekly and adjust the rules