"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." Mark Twain said that in 1897 after a newspaper mistakenly published his obituary.
Email could say the same thing.
The death of email has been predicted for decades. In 1989, John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp) declared fax would supplant it. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg announced that email was dead and launched Facebook Messages. In 2015, Inc. magazine confidently predicted email would be gone by 2020.
Every prediction was wrong. Email volume keeps growing. In 2020, 300 billion emails were sent daily. By 2025, that number hit 375 billion.
But here's what changed: humans stopped reading most of it. Marketing emails go unopened. Newsletters get archived unread. The inbox became a dumping ground.
And that's fine. Because humans may not need to read them anymore.
The User-Side Revolution
Every AI solution right now is aimed at enterprises. Microsoft Copilot. Google or even things like Claude Code or Cursor. The pitch is always the same: we'll make your employees more productive. We'll organize your company's knowledge.
Makes sense. Enterprises can pay. They have budgets. They sign contracts.
But things are shifting.
Models are getting cheaper. Apple Intelligence runs (haha) on your phone. Qwen3 runs on a laptop. OpenClaw, the open-source personal agent that went viral last month with over 100,000 GitHub stars, runs entirely on your own device.
The bottleneck isn't compute anymore. It's context.
And context lives with users.
Corporate AI has it easy. Everything lives in one place. Your company's Slack, Google Drive, Salesforce. All centralized. All accessible via APIs.
Personal AI has the opposite problem. Your digital life is scattered across hundreds of services. Your bank, your airline, your kids' school, your shopping history. Every piece living in a different silo.
How do you build a context graph that actually knows you?
Where Context Actually Lives
The most complete record of your personal context already exists. It's in your email.
Not because email is special. But because every service you interact with sends you email. Your bank sends statements. Airlines send confirmations. Schools send updates. Every purchase generates a receipt.
Email became the universal write-only API for your life.
Your inbox is an accidental context graph. Complete with timestamps, relationships, and a history that goes back years.
The Context Graph Problem
This is where it gets interesting. While everyone's building enterprise AI, the actual revolution is happening on the user side.
Google is building features that read your Gmail to understand your life. These aren't enterprise plays. They're personal intelligence plays.
The value is shifting to the edge.
When models are cheap and local, the differentiator isn't the model. It's the context. The agent that knows you better wins.
Right now, Google's intelligence only knows about your Google relationship. Apple's AI knows about your Apple relationship. But eventually this moves local. Your personal agent runs on your machine. Has access to everything. Reads across all your accounts.
That agent's superpower? It can read your email. All of it. From every provider. And extract the context that's been sitting there all along.
How This Changes things for Brands
Right now, brands optimize for human attention. They A/B test subject lines. They experiment with send times. They design beautiful templates.
But when personal agents are reading email and building context graphs, the game changes completely.
Humans don't read everything. Agents can.
This inverts the relationship. You're not trying to break through noise. You're trying to build a persistent, structured, useful relationship with an AI that's paying attention even when the human isn't.
Your competitor sent marketing emails for two years that nobody read. You stayed silent. When the user's agent is asked "recommend a running shoe," who has more context? Your competitor. The customer's agent has seen 50 emails about trail running, waterproofing technology, customer reviews. It has has seen nothing from you.
The emails humans never opened become the relationship history that agents rely on.
The Technical Bridge (Simpler Than You Think)
Email already supports this. It's called MIME. Every email is a container that can hold multiple parts.
Right now your emails look like this:
- text/plain (simple version)
- text/html (pretty version)
They could look like this:
- text/plain (fallback)
- text/html (human readable)
- text/json (agent readable)
That third part? Completely invisible to humans. Email clients that don't understand it just ignore it. But agents can parse it instantly.
A shipping notification could include structured data:
{
"@type": "ShipmentUpdate",
"orderId": "ORD-2025-8472",
"trackingNumber": "794628357201",
"estimatedDelivery": "2026-02-05T14:00:00+05:30"
}
The human sees a nice email. The agent gets structured context. Zero breaking changes. Complete backward compatibility.
The above example is simplistic. Google in Gmail already parses mails for shipping notification, upcoming bills etc. But it's event driven and episodic.
By now, you can imagine the potential.
Why Email (Not Something New)
New protocols fail because of coordination problems. You need senders to adopt and receivers to adopt and value only emerges when both happen.
Email sidesteps this entirely.
Personal agents can read unstructured email right now and extract value. No coordination needed. Gmail already parses emails to update your calendar.
The parsing is crude. But it works.
This creates the bootstrap. Users get value immediately from existing emails. And once enough users have agents reading their email, there's incentive to make those emails easier to parse.
The network effect builds itself. From the user side.
The Local Advantage
Right now, Google's AI knows about your Google relationship. Apple's AI knows about your Apple relationship. Microsoft's AI knows about your Microsoft relationship.
But your personal agent, running locally on your machine, can know about everything.
OpenClaw connects to WhatsApp, Slack, email, calendars. All in one place. No company controls it. No API gates it. That's the architecture that will IMHO edge out. Local agents that can read across all your services.
Email becomes the universal ingestion layer for personal context.
And because it's local, it's private. Your agent isn't sending your data to a server. It's processing everything on device. Building your context graph locally.
The shift from centralized AI to decentralized AI makes email more valuable, not less. Because email is the only protocol that's truly portable.
The Plumbing Nobody Celebrates
The best infrastructure is invisible. It works so well you forget it exists.
Nobody celebrates TCP/IP. But the entire internet runs on it. Nobody thinks about SMTP. But every important notification flows through it.
Email could become that kind of infrastructure. Not the interface. Not the primary experience. But the substrate that makes personal AI possible.
Your agent will have many faces. Voice assistants. Chat interfaces. Ambient intelligence. But behind all of them, quietly running in the background, will be email (among others). Ingesting context. Building relationships. Remembering everything.
One Possible Future
This is one pathway among many. I will discuss others, like an Intent Exchange. But the pieces are aligning.
Models are getting cheaper and running locally. Personal AI is shifting from enterprise to consumer. Context graphs need data from hundreds of services. Email is already there, already collecting that context, already universal.
And it's easily extensible. Add a MIME type. No breaking changes. No coordination overhead. Just start including structured data alongside the human-readable version.
The brands that understand this early will have agents that know them better. Trust them more. Recommend them first.
Not because they shouted louder. Because they built a relationship with an AI that was paying attention all along.
Email will likely not die. It'll just became plumbing. And plumbing, it turns out, is what makes everything else possible.
PS: Written with Claude.
Comments
Post a Comment