Ask any Fleet Street hack about the state of their inbox, and you’ll at once be greeted with a grimace. I get hundreds of emails a day, they’ll say, and most of them are utter tosh (top-notch newsletters notwithstanding). What I wouldn’t give to have my account shut down for good.
But the journalism world is not the only one maddened by the drudgery of email. The view is echoed by Manuela Veloso, JPMorgan’s head of AI Research, who says she too is fed up with the deluge of messages she has to respond to.
Speaking at the Evident AI Symposium on the top floor of the Cheesegrater yesterday, Veloso told an audience of bankers she’s planning a cunning solution: an AI-powered tool that can read her emails and write a reply, without her even needing to read the message.
“Whatever questions come on the email [it] generates the whole response,” she said.
“I like end-to-end products.” That certainly sounds like the kind of end-to-end product Spy could sign up to, too. But pity future JPM customers, who may struggle to find a human being to speak to. ‘Your email is important to us…’ the AI-generated response will likely begin.
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