Email triage: the second-best first automation
If supplier invoices do not fit your company, this is the other one that works. Same method, different input, one extra hazard.
February’s recommendation for a first automation was incoming supplier invoices. It does not suit everyone — a service business with thirty invoices a month has nothing to automate there. The general-purpose alternative is the shared mailbox.
Most Swiss SMEs have one: info@, or bestellung@, or a mailbox two people watch between other work. It receives a mixture of enquiries, orders, supplier notices, invoices, applications and spam, and somebody sorts it by hand every morning.
What to automate, precisely
Not answering. Sorting.
The model reads each message and assigns it to a category you defined: new enquiry, existing customer, supplier, invoice, application, other. It can extract the obvious fields — sender, reference number, what is being asked — and route the message to the right person or folder.
That is a genuinely good fit for the criteria from January: it repeats daily, the rules are stable, an error is visible immediately, and the person doing it today dislikes it.
Why it is second-best rather than first
Because of one hazard invoices do not have: everything in the mailbox was written by someone outside your company.
That is the prompt injection problem from 12 May, in its most direct form. A message can contain text aimed at the system reading it. This is not exotic; it is the obvious attack against any tool known to read incoming mail.
Which is why the design is narrow: the triage assigns a category and moves a message. It does not reply, does not act, does not read your file server. The worst case of a successful injection is a message filed in the wrong folder.
The setup that works
- Categories you already use. Whatever the person sorting today does in their head. Do not invent a taxonomy.
- A confidence threshold. Anything the system is unsure about goes to a human queue, flagged. The seventy-per-cent principle from 23 April.
- No automatic replies in version one. Drafting a reply for a person to send is a separate, later project, and it is where the tone and commitment risks live.
What it is worth
In a company receiving sixty messages a day, sorting costs about forty minutes. Recovering thirty of those, five days a week, is a hundred hours a year — the same arithmetic as 4 June, from a process nobody thinks of as a process.