Why not just AI every email?
Why not hand every email to AI, from the first build to the final send? It would be faster. It would also give you twenty different versions of your brand, headlines that run past the character limit, and nobody accountable when something goes out wrong.
In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey take on the "just AI everything" pitch that's all over LinkedIn. Elliot starts with a real test: he connected Claude to his Gmail and had it unsubscribe inboxes from everything they'd signed up to. It cleared weeks of work, but it still came back with a handful of failures per person to sort out by hand.
Joe explains why email design systems, the pre-approved building blocks that keep a brand consistent, are turning into the guardrails AI needs. A prompt or a skill can describe your brand, but a design system with validation rules can enforce it. That matters when an LLM can't reliably count to forty characters. The question now isn't whether AI can build an email. It's how you keep 200 agents building for your brand without drifting off it.
Will brings in what CRM teams are telling us: junior builds that look fine and then break in the inbox, taped-together workflows that leave every email slightly off-brand, and how much nuance you'd have to teach a model before it gets things right.
They also ask whether every email will end up looking the same, why AI should raise standards rather than cut corners, and which jobs nobody should be doing by hand anymore, like checking every link in 16 languages or copying and pasting all day.
In this episode:
In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey take on the "just AI everything" pitch that's all over LinkedIn. Elliot starts with a real test: he connected Claude to his Gmail and had it unsubscribe inboxes from everything they'd signed up to. It cleared weeks of work, but it still came back with a handful of failures per person to sort out by hand.
Joe explains why email design systems, the pre-approved building blocks that keep a brand consistent, are turning into the guardrails AI needs. A prompt or a skill can describe your brand, but a design system with validation rules can enforce it. That matters when an LLM can't reliably count to forty characters. The question now isn't whether AI can build an email. It's how you keep 200 agents building for your brand without drifting off it.
Will brings in what CRM teams are telling us: junior builds that look fine and then break in the inbox, taped-together workflows that leave every email slightly off-brand, and how much nuance you'd have to teach a model before it gets things right.
They also ask whether every email will end up looking the same, why AI should raise standards rather than cut corners, and which jobs nobody should be doing by hand anymore, like checking every link in 16 languages or copying and pasting all day.
In this episode:
- Letting Claude loose on an inbox
- Why not just AI everything?
- Email design systems as guardrails for AI
- Skills vs validation rules: describing your brand vs enforcing it
- Keeping 200 AI agents on-brand
- Accountability: "the agents did it" isn't an answer
- AI doesn't replace humans, it shows where they're invaluable
- Ask AI for the process, not just the output
If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you keep hearing that AI can do the lot, this episode gives you a better question to ask: where does your team add value, and what does AI need from you to stay on brand?
What would you do with the time AI gives back? Tell us in the comments.
Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.
Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/
Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/
Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/
EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/
ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/
What would you do with the time AI gives back? Tell us in the comments.
Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.
Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/
Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/
Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/
EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/
ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/