Say goodbye to email overload: How AI-powered automation can streamline your operations

AI tools are taking the world by storm and transforming the way businesses operate. But are they really worth the hype? It depends on who you ask, but one thing is certain, businesses that take advantage of AI significantly boost their workflow efficiency while driving operational costs down. A prime example of this is AI-powered email automation.

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What is AI-powered email automation?

Automating email workflows is not entirely new - think of automated Out-of-Office replies sent from your company mailbox when you’re enjoying vacation, or those annoying abandoned cart notifications retailers send when you leave an online shop.

The addition of artificial intelligence (AI) takes it to a whole new level. Picture this: AI reading your emails and extracting relevant data from them, crafting personalised replies, and automating your mundane tasks like sorting and scheduling. It's no wonder that AI automation is rapidly streamlining processes across various industries, saving countless hours of manual labour each day.

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Benefits of automating email workflows

Let’s dive deeper into AI automation benefits.

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Save time and money

Efficiency is the backbone of any successful business. By automating time-consuming and manual operational processes like email workflows, you can significantly reduce costs as well as the amount of time your team dedicates to repetitive and recurring tasks.

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In fact, repeated tasks like data entry, data processing and email management can cost businesses up to 19 working days per year per employee - with manual email management alone taking up over 4 hours per day. But when you incorporate AI automation, these efficiencies can reach new heights, powering up your business to stay ahead of the competition.

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Reduce errors (HITL)

Manual data entry is known to have an error rate of anywhere from 1 to 4%. While this may not sound like a significant amount at first, a 4% error rate piles up fast when you’re working with large volumes of data and quickly becomes a headache for teams, especially if we’re talking about crucial emails with your suppliers or customers. 

This is where AI-automated workflows come to the rescue. These workflows leverage highly trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle tasks like data extraction and categorization, and companies across the globe are taking advantage of them to reduce human error. Using AI tools greatly reduces the risk associated with manual data processing, such as typos, omissions, and general human error.

To double down on accuracy and reduce the risk of errors even more, an extra layer of quality control in the form of ‘human-in-the-loop’ (HITL) can be implemented in your AI-powered workflows. Human-in-the-loop is just what it says, manual human input in the process handled by AI. It can look different depending on what process you are automating but often comes in the form of more accurate oversight and approval of the next step.

Some processes may be set up to require human input only if the LLM's confidence is less than a certain percent. While others may streamline entire processes using AI and a human is responsible for the final go-ahead once all tasks are completed. Think of it as a quality assurance or quality control step in your workflow.

The combination of AI and human-in-the-loop is the perfect sweet spot for many companies looking to implement more AI automation in their business. Uify, an AI platform for automating and streamlining processes such as email workflows, offers human-in-the-loop possibilities.  

Uify allows you to use AI to power your workflows while also giving you the opportunity to jump in and execute actions manually. For example, Uify can process and extract important data from your incoming emails, and even draft a reply. Once this process is complete, the platform will wait for a human’s confirmation to add this data to other internal tools and send these emails. So you can let AI process your emails and then log into a platform to approve them in bulk. This is the perfect combination: automating and accelerating with AI while ensuring quality control.

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Employee satisfaction: Reduce the mundane

In today’s world more so than ever, employee satisfaction is a top priority for successful businesses. When employees feel unsatisfied and unvalued, up to 76% will look for another job opportunity. 

One of the most effective ways to ensure teams are satisfied and employee retention stays high is by freeing employees from boring and mundane tasks. These tasks are not only more accurate when done by AI but give employees time to focus on other more exciting activities.

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By taking care of repetitive and time-consuming email management chores like email data extraction, sorting, categorizing, and even generating responses, artificial intelligence unlocks a whole new level of employee satisfaction and boosts morale. With more time and energy, team members can focus on exciting projects, brainstorm innovative ideas, and build strong relationships with clients.

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How can you implement automation in your email operations?

Are you dealing with a flood of incoming quotes, requests, data updates and mundane copy-and-paste tasks too? This is the perfect scenario for platforms like Uify, which Ops teams use to leverage AI and create their own internal apps to cut manual work processing emails. With the help of AI-powered solutions from Uify, you can supercharge your daily tasks with minimal effort.

For less-techy teams or those looking for simple business apps, working with Uify is easy thanks to its drag-and-drop interface and direct integrations with popular business tools such as Salesforce, Google Sheets, Zendesk, Slack, or MySQL. 

Let's look at popular use cases in the hospitality sector.

Booking requests are the cause of email overload for many teams. Some requests may be standard like ‘two single beds’ or ‘pet-friendly’ but some are more complex, like discussing special needs or changes to a menu. They may even have multiple typos and errors that a basic automation tool would not understand.

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Either way, incoming requests are in the form of unstructured data. This means that your team needs to read these emails, extract relevant data, create new booking requests manually in your internal tool and draft responses confirming the booking to the email sender. With multiple similar requests streaming in, this manual workflow can take hours each day to complete - and this is exactly when AI automation steps in.

In this case, data extraction is the process that needs to happen to pull out the information regarding the request and disregard all the other fluff of the email. Thankfully, one super advantage of using AI to do this, is that the algorithms are trained to take the whole email into context rather than picking up isolated words or phrases. This is incredibly important, especially when dealing with text.

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Once the tool extracts the necessary data and categorises it, it is then transformed into a structured format that can be added directly to your internal booking system.  Your entire booking process happens automatically. 

As a bonus, platforms like Uify connect with OpenAI to generate the confirmation email sent to guests. In the case of Uify, you can ask AI to generate an email reply and send it from the same interface. No need to waste time on switching between your tools and your email inbox.

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How Uify automates your email workflow with AI

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If you want to save hundreds of hours on manual email management, look no further than Uify - a low code platform for managing your data sources and automating your workflows. With just a few clicks, you can quickly build custom solutions - internal apps combining all your data sources, and create your own interface that works for your entire team. 

You can connect apps like Gmail, Hubspot, Salesforce, and OpenAI to let AI process the incoming emails for you. Take it a step further and leverage AI to automatically send personalised replies. Now you have a fully automated workflow with human-in-the-loop to boost your productivity. 

Check out our detailed step-by-step guide on extracting data from emails using AI and creating your own working app in just 20 minutes.

Are you ready to join top companies already leveraging AI automation? Say goodbye to email overload and embrace the power of AI to streamline your operations.