How Deeply Will You Let Artificial Intelligence Run Your Email?

One evening last week, you spent a couple of hours precisely wording an email to your boss hoping to garner enough sympathy to make it seem implausible to not grant your wish for a day off. You’re a hardworking guy. You nearly meet some of your targets nearly some of the time. How could he fail to recognise how deserving of a day off you are! He owes you a day off.

And it worked!

What a nice boss you have!

You pull up in a parking space. There are plenty to choose from — this is a Tuesday afternoon after all. Then who should pull into a space on the other side of the car park? None other than your boss, Gary. Who the hell is leading staff training today then?

Weird. Do you acknowledge? Do you wait a few moments and then go into the club house after him?

Too late.

He’s seen you and you’ve made eye contact. You get out, wave and give a ‘Hello’, not sure if you’re about to be reprimanded despite the assurances your AI assistant gave you this morning that you were not expected at work. Somehow, you instantly feel like you’ve been caught bunking.

“Steve, what the hell are you doing here?” he calls out as he walks towards you, hands on hips. But there is a sheepish quiver in his voice. His boot is open exposing an expensive set of golf clubs. He looks panicked and guilty, like he has been caught having an affair.

You silently gawp at each other for a split second, each trying to reach for the right word to say next. The silence is broken by the arrival of a third car. A two seater convertible, top down and most definitely not adhering to the 5 mph speed limit. Its occupant, Priya, your fiery CEO whose face is 90% designer sunglasses, screams across at your boss as she careers past, “Golf, Gary? GOLF! Not a Spa day or a yoga retreat. Or, wine tasting? Golf! Jeez! What are we doing this afternoon? Axe throwing? Paintball? Laser tag?” She’s out of her car now and fighting with a bungee cord that’s keeping her boot lid fastened down over the top of a set of pristine, never-been-used golf clubs.

What the hell is going on? What has happened to your blissful day of solitude?

Gary only manages a guttural “Errrr” before a fourth car enters the car park. A sensible family car, in a sensible colour slowly and carefully reverses into a space. Then out steps Daniel, your monotoned chief financial officer. He’s wearing a salwar kameez. And a kilt. When he realises that everyone else is dressed in a conventional manner, in the same clothes they would be found in back at the office, he turns a deep shade of red and looks like he wants the ground to open up.

As Daniel puts his car keys in his sporran a collective penny drops and everyone turns to face you, eyes burning into your soul.

Priya points a finger directly at you. “You said you had recalibrated it! You assured us it would never happen again.”

You were brought in to fix the ailing IT systems and were recruited because of your self-purported strength and knowledge of AI. Of course, in reality, there are no real experts — everyone consults the same tool.

You had a quick win early on when you helped Priya develop the company’s mission statement. You quickly identified that she was a sucker for pseudo-academic, vacuous business speak. Had she looked over your shoulder as you brazenly typed in your prompt to the language model, she might have seen you for the charlatan that you are:

“Write a mission statement for a company that offers workplace health and safety training. Make it sound super academic but impossible to decipher. Include loads of unnecessary buzzwords. Include, ‘syllogism’, ‘virtuosity’, ‘empiricalisticable’. And, wrap it up in some tortured sporting analogy.”

Priya was in awe of you as you read out the language model’s offering:

“At [Company Name], we endeavor to cultivate an exceptional milieu by employing the zenith of didactic virtuosity to proffer avant-garde workplace health and safety training solutions. Our indomitable pursuit of scholarly syllogism imbues our meticulously curated curriculum with a dynamic amalgamation of theoretical profundity and practical applicability.

Embracing the synergistic amalgam of cutting-edge research and pedagogical innovation, we foster an environment where empiricalisticable paradigms flourish. Through a lexicon steeped in erudition, we disseminate perspicacious insights and foster conscientious comportment, thereby fostering a culture of unwavering safety consciousness within the organizational tapestry.

Similar to an elite athlete harnessing their innate potential to soar to greater heights, we empower professionals to navigate the labyrinthine realm of occupational hazards and regulatory compliance with the utmost finesse. Just as a seasoned athlete relies on astute tactics, rigorous training, and unwavering dedication, we bestow our clientele with an arsenal of knowledge, honed skills, and a nuanced playbook to triumph over the multifaceted challenges that beset the arena of workplace health and safety.”

She looked like she wanted to give you a hug. She didn’t, but instead instantly granted all the access permissions you needed to sort the IT.

When you said you could improve productivity by 60% by employing AI Autoresponders her face lit up. Actually your exact phrasing was: “Through the harmonious alignment of synergistic cognitive amplification, one has the potential to unlock an extraordinary surge in productivity, transcending conventional boundaries by a remarkable margin of 60%… by employing AI Autoresponders”.

And initially the results were impressive.

Within a week, most employees had stopped checking email altogether, depending instead on their digital personal assistants to manage all communication. Staff broadly turned up on time to the right places. Training materials were shared with staff and clients ahead of time. Invoices were delivered promptly and, so far, had all been paid within a few hours — all it took was a switch in the tone and cadence settings for outgoing payment request emails from ‘friendly but firm’ to ‘friendly but coercive with a hint of malice’.

For a little while you were the golden boy, regarded by all as some kind of technical genius with psychic business insight and unassailable knowledge. People seemed to wilt with inferiority as you swaggered about the office. And it was at this point you got cocky.

Imbibed in a sense of warmth from the high regard of your peers, one morning you dived into the language model and auto-responder configuration settings.

You notice the email conversational-depth parameter is set to a maximum of three responses by each party. Wow — such a productivity increase with autoresponders replying to each other only three times. What if this was higher? You drag the slider to the right, labelled ‘no-limit’.

While the settings are open, you also adjust the internal communication sentiment to ‘warm and encouraging of personal growth’, and feeling a sense of benevolence you target a number of individuals for ‘tailored lexicon intervention’. For example, Carlos and Jean, who clearly fancy each other but are both too shy to do anything about it, have their 1:1 correspondence tagged as ‘professional but amorous and mildly erotic’.

Your first realisation that something is wrong occurs two days later when Jean struts right up to you and slaps you across the face with a piñata. It transpired that the language model lasered in on the word ‘Carlos’. All following correspondence between the pair was heavily centered around a misplaced belief that he was steeped in Mexican culture. He wasn’t. This is Dunstable, UK. His mother, Pam, just liked the name Carlos.

There was no basis for your feeling that the two had romantic feelings for each other. Jean, prior to your meddling, had been subtly and sensitively supporting Carlos through a period of grieving as he had recently lost his brother, Kevin, to cancer.

In the 48 hour period since you interfered, the AI model had struck up a conversation between the two friends that spanned 216 email exchanges, each more blue — and Mexican — than the last.

It became apparent that something was wrong when Jean had seemingly instigated a video conference for the web development team, despite all being present in the building and working not more than 10 meters apart. As the meeting started, a Mariachi band appeared front and centre of a dozen monitors and performed a love song dedicated to Carlos, commissioned by Jean via email without her knowledge. As the song concluded, a courier appeared and Carlos signed for a package then from the packaging pulled a decorative piñata filled with chocolate hearts and anatomically suggestive pasta.

Not ten minutes later, the entire staff was summonsed to the lobby via email. The lobby being the only place in the building that could accommodate everyone in two rings of chairs, one facing outward, the other facing inwards. Here they found Malcolm announcing that “Each date would last 2 minutes only” and that he would ring a bell to indicate when it was time to move on. Malcolm was firmly of the belief that consent for his venture to find love was 100% widespread. No one wanted to be there.

Simultaneously 50 people pulled out their phones to check their email manually for the first time in a week.

Your game was up. You’d been found out.

There and then, as Malcolm packed away his clothes rail and the 25 different outfits he’d brought for each date, Priya made you walk her through the AI tool, setting by setting.

For five minutes she said nothing, then finally, exasperated, asked you to explain exactly what you thought the word ‘erotic’ meant. When you whimpered “You know — warm and friendly” you immediately appeared exactly as you really are, a simple technician full of bluster and with the vocabulary of a child.

You no longer have the ear of your boss’ boss and now complete a weekly report to Gary outlining progress towards your specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound targets. You feel so 1990s you want to throw up. But, you tone down the settings and things largely go back to how they were before. You spend most of your time helping staff with their IT issues while avoiding eye contact.

The only evidence of your benevolent interference is found by observing the conduct of Daniel, the company’s formerly stuffy controlling financial officer. He mindfully read every email coming ostensibly from senior leadership and was so encouraged by the warmth and tenderness mixed in with demands for up-to-date accounts that it ignited in him an unstoppable quest for self-improvement.

By the end of the week, he was so self-actualised that he had thrown out his entire wardrobe, destroyed the priceless violin he’d been given by a father that he had only now realised he had despised his whole life, and destroyed the enormous collection of classical music he had been building since his second year of private school. He now was a man of the world. He still lived with his wife and kids in Dunstable, but he was a man of the world no less.

One day Daniel would turn up at work wearing traditional African dress, blasting Ethiopian dubstep from his PC’s speakers, the next day it would be Bhangra beats mismatched with tartan. It only stopped when Priya had a gentle word in his ear questioning why he was listening to Chaiyya Chaiyya. While she accepted his explanation that he “just liked it”, something about the way she followed up with, “Ok, and why the poncho?”, brought him back to Dunstable with a bump. He visually shrivelled with embarrassment and the following day wore a Marks and Spencer suit he had bought after work.

It was a mystery even to you as to why you had ended up with your colleagues in a dreary car park. You had toned down the autoresponders after all, and had been manually writing all your emails all by yourself.

It turned out others had learned how to exploit the AI tool for their own purposes too. The golf course manager had learned that simply by replacing every full stop with a question mark marketing engagement was improved by 94% and, more importantly, served as a trigger for inbound systems to bypass any human intervention:

“Dear Head of IT?
I trust this email finds you well?
I am writing to inform you of our range of corporate packages?
There is something for everyone?
A perfect pitch and putt half day?
Eighteen holes for the price of nine? …”

When you tried to book your sneaky solo round of 18 holes and subsequently begged Gary for a day off, you unwittingly started a chain of hidden emails creating a company away day.

As a confused mob, you head to the golf course entrance where you find a note pinned to the door:

“Sorry, we are closed today due to compulsory health and safety staff training.”