AI integration with email history

I love having AI review specific types of emails I get to see if they're worth my time. Today I helped my friend Alec Cheung - a fellow marketer in the CMO Coffee Talk community I'm a member of - set up one of these AI automations and it turned out awesome, so I wanted to tell you about it (with his permission of course). Here's the backstory: Going through website form submissions was eating up too much marketing team time. The submissions (which have a place for open-ended inputs that make them hard to screen via traditional methods) flow through Pardot and trigger emails that required human review to figure out if they were genuine leads or just spam. Tons turn out to be junk, creating unnecessary work for Alec's team. Others are genuine leads (or actual paying clients) that a human definitely needs to follow up with. Alec posted in our CMO Coffee Talk AI channel a few weeks ago asking for ideas on how to improve their process with AI. This is a super simple automation, so I offered to help if he'd let me share what we did. He was in! Our fix was AI-powered automation using Zapier. Here's the flow: 1️⃣. A visitor submits a form on Alec's company's website. 2️⃣. Pardot sends an email with the form contents to a designated address. 3️⃣. Zapier kicks off the automation. 4️⃣. GPT-4o reads, analyzes, and categorizes the submission. 5️⃣. Based on the categorization, the automation filters the next steps. 6️⃣. If a human needs to attend to the email, it emails them (along with the appropriate categorization, directly in the flag email's subject line). If it does not require a human, then nobody is notified about the form submission. The result is a far more streamlined workflow that will save a lot of monotonous manual effort. And it's CHEAP. It looks like this automation will cost Alec around $0.10-$0.20 per day in AI usage to run - yes, cents, not dollars. It's an incredibly affordable solution for such a big time (and headache)-saver. Alec was new to using Zapier for this kind of task, so we had 2 calls. First, we planned the planned process, and I gave him some homework, and then today we finished everything. (And he gave me the okay to share with you!) While the setup is pretty straightforward, it does require a base knowledge of Zapier, and how to write solid AI prompts (this isn't something for AI newbies to take on alone). For those in CMO Coffee Talk, I'll go much deeper into this automation during our 2/19 mid-week Zoom "What Every CMO Needs to Know About How AI is Evolving in 2025: Automated Workflows, Agents, and Reasoning Models." Also - if you're a marketer and want to explore AI automations, I do get into that in my Foundations of Generative AI for B2B Marketing course (🔗 in bio). --- UPDATE: A recording of the webinar for CMOs I mentioned above is now available! More details at: https://lnkd.in/gxe9EQ69

There’s a lot packed into the Summer ’25 release for Sales Cloud, but today I will share some important update with regards to the emails. If you’ve used Einstein Activity Capture before, you probably already know how email data was always a bit tricky, it wasn’t fully available in reports or automations, and it couldn’t be accessed via APIs. But that’s changing now with the introduction of Sync Email as Salesforce Activity. This feature basically turns your synced emails into real activity records in Salesforce, so now they show up as EmailMessage and Task records, tied to leads, contacts, accounts, and even opportunities. That means you can finally pull this email data into your standard reports, use it in automation flows or triggers, and even analyze it using AI tools. That’s a big step forward for visibility and ROI tracking. Because email is captured as activity data, you get a complete view of all your email activities on the Salesforce Platform, unlocking the full power of operational reports, analytics, and more. Activity data is also available to use with APIs. - Enhanced Email is enabled automatically. - Email sharing now follows your company’s activity sharing rules. - Email records and other activities are included in operational activity reports. Or, you can use an email or email insight report to drill into specifics. For example, whether the email was sent or received based on the Incoming field on the EmailMessage object. - For security and privacy, internal and excluded emails aren’t stored in Salesforce. End users have more control over their email privacy with an option to capture only the email header (sender, recipients, and sent date and time only). - You can use email content as input to an AI Agent. For example, you can use an AI Agent to triage a customer’s incoming email based on sentiment, or use an AI Agent to draft a response based on email content. The only thing you need to be careful of is, because synced email and tasks are now stored in Salesforce, they’re subject to your org’s data storage limits. To minimize data storage costs, it is recommended to regularly archiving email data to long-term storage such as Data Cloud. But with new features come changes too. Two things are being retired: - Activity 360 Reporting, Metrics, and Dashboards – these are going away by Summer '26. If you're using them today, now’s the time to start the switch over to Sync Email as Salesforce Activity to future-proof your reporting. - Salesforce for Outlook – this legacy tool is being officially retired by end of 2027. If your teams are still using it, now’s a good time to start planning your move to the new Outlook Integration + Einstein Activity Capture combo. That’s just a peek into what’s coming, plenty more in the Summer '25 notes but this one definitely caught my attention. #Salesforce Salesforce Trailhead Salesforce Sales Cloud Salesforce Admins

Still drowning in email? That’s a choice. Email sucks. Full stop. When did you hear someone say, "I love email!"? P.S. if someone says that, run away from them... Joking aside, almost every customer we have at one point has joked, "When will AI be able to clean out my inbox?". Well, I decided to spend one day finding out... I made a scrappy little sidekick I now call "Email Pal", built on n8n + OpenAI, integrated w/ Outlook (could also be Gmail). Here is how it works: 1. Tags my incoming emails with categories I actually care about and defined (Opportunities, News, Invoicing, Solicitations, etc.) 2. Drafts smart replies based on the whole thread and other related data, so I don’t respond like a robot. 3. Changes tone depending on who it’s talking to (client ≠ recruiter ≠ founder friend). 4. Finds follow-ups I forgot and drafts those little polite but firm nudges: “You mentioned sending a doc…haven’t seen it yet. Just bumping this :)” Next Steps: Integration w/ CRM and other project delivery systems to build additional context on the overall relationship w/ our customers. Keep in mind, this solution is only for DRAFTS. I tweak, approve, and send. Always. I still wouldn't trust AI to email on my behalf (at least not externally). This isn’t a product. It’s a prototype. But it’s already rescued a deal, recovered meetings, and saved me hours. Email Pal is one of dozens of tiny, high-leverage systems we’ve built. Want to see it in action? Drop me a note. 👇 (Screenshot below) [This post was Human Generated, Human Approved]

Google’s latest move with AI Search signals a major shift in how people will discover hotels—and it starts with email. With a new opt-in feature, Google allows users to connect Gmail to AI Search. When activated, Google’s AI can use information from your emails—like newsletters from your favorite media brands or hotel confirmations—to tailor your search results. For example, if you search “things to do in Paris next week,” and you have a hotel confirmation in your inbox, Google might suggest activities near that hotel. For hotels, this unlocks a new layer of search visibility—and a new layer of competition. Historically, being discoverable in search was about SEO, backlinks, and OTA positioning. But now, showing up in someone’s inbox can impact what they see in AI search. If your hotel is part of a guest’s email trail—through confirmations, newsletters, or loyalty communications—it increases the likelihood that your brand (or similar ones) will show up in their future travel planning. Google hasn’t said it will prioritize brands based on how many times their emails appear, or how often users engage with them—but it’s not a far leap. If AI can see that a user frequently receives emails from luxury hotels like Baccarat or Aman, and tends to open or click those emails, it’s easy to imagine that “luxury hotels in NYC” might soon reflect that preference. This blurs the line between CRM, SEO, and top-of-funnel strategy. Hotels that build strong, consistent email relationships with their guests aren’t just improving retention—they’re laying the groundwork to be rediscovered in AI-powered moments that matter. Email (and newsletters) has always been important in generating inspiration and catalyzing demand, but it's now a critical input to the discovery engine.

SO many times I've wished I could talk to my Gmail and ask questions. But since Google hasn't set up those tools yet (get crackin' Alphabet!), I created a fairly easy AI workaround to make it possible. The idea with this is that you'll use a Google App Script (don't worry, you don't need to know code!) to analyze your messages. Here's how it works: 1. Put a Google label on any emails that you want to review. That might be all emails from a certain date range, or just the ones sent to a certain person or company. This is an important first step, because AI can't read your entire inbox at once. 2. Ask ChatGPT to create a Google App Script for you using this exact prompt: “Can you create a Google Apps Script that pulls all Gmail messages with the label ‘[Your Label Name]’ into a spreadsheet with columns for Date, To, From, Subject, and Body?” You’ll get a clean, copy-paste-able script that you can drop into https://script.google.com. When you run the script, it’ll export every email with that label into a Google Sheet — no coding experience required. 3. Once your messages are in your Sheets (or an exported spreadsheet) you can ask ChatGPT to help you analyze them. You can say things like: How many times did I email this person in June?” OR “Summarize my back-and-forth with this client.” OR "Are there any pending to dos for this account?" This AI workflow is one of the most helpful ways I’ve found to review my own communication, whether I’m wrapping up a project, prepping for a meeting, or just making sure I didn’t forget to follow up. It's literally saved me half a day of analysis every months. Happy to share the exact script and prompts I've use if you want to try it!