The AI inbox revolution and modern communication friction

Email came with the promise of efficiency, clarity and less friction in organisational communication.

Right now, things are shifting again. According to findings from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making & Society, 45.6% of Australians have recently used a generative AI tool, with 82.6% of those individuals utilizing the technology for text generation. A healthy chunk of that activity likely includes managing the daily flood of incoming messages.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence technologies, such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, is increasingly allowing workers to offload the repetitive routines of tending one’s inbox—specifically drafting, summarising, and replying. Yet, this automated efficiency raises a critical question for modern offices: will these tools reduce friction, or will they simply generate entirely new forms of it? As workplace observers ask, are we actually about to get more email?

Parallels from history: Why the paperless office never arrived

To understand the trajectory of workplace AI, we can look back at earlier technological shifts. That didn’t happen. If you work in an office today, there’s a good chance you still have a printer humming in the corner.

In their 2001 book, The Myth of the Paperless Office, authors Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper show how digital tools rarely eliminate older forms of work. Instead, they reshape them. The takeaway is not that offices failed to modernise, but rather that work reorganised around what these new tools could do.

This was all too clunky or impossible to perform via the digital alternatives of the era. At the same time, email and digitisation dramatically lowered the cost of producing and distributing communication, making it far easier to send more messages, to more people, more often.

Smoothing the rough edges of corporate communication

Will AI be different?

Some new AI tools offer to manage your inbox entirely, feeding directly into broader privacy concerns about the technology.

Rather than removing the need to communicate, these tools offer pathways to make a delicate performance easier. But as email continues to function as both a channel for information and a social ritual, automating the drafting process changes the underlying dynamics of how professionals signal competence and collegiality.

The hidden social labor of the corporate inbox

At work, it’s often about signalling competence, responsiveness, collegiality and authority.

Looking forward to a less cluttered digital workplace

The labour of email was never just about crafting sentences. It has always been about the scanning, the sorting and the deciding. AI doesn’t remove this burden; if anything, it amplifies it.

What would a workplace look like if email wasn’t the default solution to every coordination problem? Perhaps there would be fewer performative check-ins, such as touching base, looping colleagues in, or following up on previous notes, alongside clearer expectations about what actually requires a response.

Email, much like paper, is likely to persist for good reasons. It remains simple, flexible, and universal, allowing things to be deferred, revisited, forwarded, and quietly ignored. But if artificial intelligence is going to alter any of this, the hope is that it makes visible how much of our digital communication is mere ritual, how much is habit, and how much has long been unnecessary.