Tomasz Tunguz

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Artisanal Emails

Artisanal chocolate, artisanal candles, artisanal silk scarves. What about an artisanal email?
LLM’s powerful content generation abilities will soon automate many emails we send. Sales teams have started using software that identifies leads, researches them, identifies commonalities (a shared university affiliation or a passion for a sports team), drafts the email, & sends it. Then it tracks the email for follow up.
New product launches will bring similar tools to everyone.
Gmail’s Duet features & Microsoft’s Office CoPilot inject predictive drafting to anyone with an email address & a credit card.
SMS apps in Android & iOS predict responses to incoming messages. A click on a machine-generated-and-suggested response, even if it’s not the mot juste, is just easier.
As systems become more powerful, more accurate, & more productive, these mass-produced missives will flood our inboxes more than they already have.
The rarer kind of email will be the artisanal email : the one Mark Twain would have been proud of - drafted, edited, clarified, bespoke to the sender with authenticity.
This automated future raises all kinds of questions for businesses :

will artisanal emails’ response rates differ from mass-produced emails?
will the delta between those rates justify more artisanal emails or will the economies of scale of the machine overwhelm the economics with volume?
how will sales teams restructure as a result of the mechanization of outbound email? will quotas for SDRs & BDRs increase but headcount remain the same?

Over the next few quarters, we’ll start to see the impact of these new tools, but I don’t think an accurate measure of these productivity gains will be known for a year or more.
We’ll need to watch the impact to funnel conversion through many sales cycles to develop confidence that any changes are statistically significant.
But if it does work, the artisanal email may become a rarity.

Tomasz Tunguz - Artisanal Emails

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Artisanal Emails