How do you use AI for email and everyday writing?

What it does well

Everyday writing is where an assistant earns its keep fastest. It drafts a reply to the Monday morning inbox. It makes a blunt message warmer or a wordy one shorter. It turns a long supplier email into three lines. It proofreads for spelling and clumsy sentences.

It also produces first drafts of the things nobody enjoys writing: a polite late-payment reminder, a notice of changed opening hours, a letter to a customer about a delayed order, a note to a supplier chasing a delivery. You edit a draft in a minute instead of starting from a blank page.

Give it context and your own voice

The assistant knows nothing about your business unless you tell it. Say who the reader is, what happened and what you want the reader to do. A draft written without that comes out generic, the sort of email that could have come from anyone.

For your voice, paste in one or two of your own emails that you were pleased with, with the customer names removed, and say write like these. Examples work better than a list of rules. Add a short standing note, such as short sentences, plain words, first name sign-off, and save it so nobody retypes it.

What you still do

You are the sender. Read the whole draft before it goes, and check every date, price, name and promise against your own records, because an invented detail reads just as smoothly as a true one. A draft that says the part will arrive on Friday has made a promise in your name.

Some messages stay in your own hands: the reply to a customer who is leaving, the apology for something that went badly wrong, the note to someone who has been with you for twenty years. Write those yourself.

Keep private information out

Emails often hold things that should not travel: account numbers, health details, passwords, anything covered by a confidentiality agreement. Use a business account, take names and numbers out of examples, and leave the sensitive messages to be written by a person. If you are unsure whether a tool is approved, treat it as not approved.

What to do this week

Take the next five routine emails you would normally write from scratch. For each, give the assistant the message, your point in a sentence, and one of your own past emails as a model. Read the draft, fix it, send it. Keep a note of the instructions that gave the best result, and by Friday you will have your first standing note.