Email classification and drafting
Classify shared inbox messages, suggest draft responses and route them for human review, without sending anything automatically.
- Service
- AI Solutions
- Suits
- Businesses running a shared inbox with several distinct enquiry types
- Industries
- AI, Automation, Microsoft 365, General business
The problem
A shared inbox contains different enquiry types requiring manual sorting: new enquiries, existing customer questions, supplier correspondence, invoices and marketing. Someone triages it between other tasks, and the backlog grows whenever they are busy.
How the work is usually done today
- One person monitors the shared inbox
- Each message is read and mentally categorised
- It is forwarded, flagged or left for later
- Similar responses are rewritten each time
- Messages left for later are sometimes never returned to
The ByteX approach
Classify incoming messages into agreed categories, suggest a draft response where the type is well understood, and route both to a person for review. Nothing is sent without a human deciding to send it.
Example workflow
-
Define categories
Agree the categories that reflect how the business actually handles messages, with an explicit unknown category.
-
Classify
Categorise incoming messages and apply the agreed routing, flagging low-confidence cases for manual triage.
-
Draft where useful
For well-understood types, prepare a suggested response from approved material.
-
Human review
The responsible person reviews, edits and sends. Automatic sending is not implemented.
-
Measure
Report on volume by category and classification accuracy, and refine over time.
Potential systems
What may be involved
Indicative only. What is actually possible depends on your platforms, subscription tiers and each vendor's integration terms.
- Microsoft 365, Exchange Online and Outlook
- Azure OpenAI Service or a comparable provider
- Power Automate
- CRM or ticketing platforms
- SharePoint or SQL for the classification record
Expected outcomes
What tends to improve
Operational outcomes rather than percentage claims. ByteX does not publish savings figures it has not measured in your business.
- Faster processing of a shared inbox, particularly after busy periods
- Messages reaching the right person sooner
- Less rewriting of responses that are substantially the same each time
- Visibility of enquiry volume and mix, which was previously invisible
- Sensitive responses are never sent automatically. Complaints, disputes, financial matters and anything with legal implications always require a person.
- Classification accuracy is measured during a pilot; low-confidence messages route to manual triage rather than being forced into a category.
- Drafts are suggestions. The person sending remains responsible for the content.
- Access to a shared mailbox requires appropriate Microsoft 365 permissions and licensing.
Security and privacy considerations
- Email content frequently contains personal and commercial information; the provider's data handling terms are reviewed before any message is processed.
- Mailbox access uses least-privilege permissions scoped to the specific shared mailbox.
- Message contents are not written to application logs; only references, categories and outcomes are recorded.
- Classification records follow an agreed retention period.
- Staff are informed that inbox messages are processed by an automated system.
Related services
Services this draws on
AI Solutions
Narrow, well-guarded AI applied to jobs where it genuinely helps, with a person kept in the loop for anything that matters.
- Staff finding policy answers in seconds, with sources shown
- Shared inboxes sorted and drafted, not auto-sent
- First drafts prepared from approved source material
Business Automation
Remove the repetitive copying, chasing and re-keying that quietly consumes hours of staff time every week.
- Scheduled reports that arrive without anyone preparing them
- Enquiries routed to the right person automatically
- Approved data flowing between systems instead of by hand
Related use cases
Problems that often appear alongside this one
Automated customer-enquiry routing
- Business problem
- Enquiries arrive through website forms, a shared mailbox, social messages and phone notes, and are manually forwarded to whoever seems most appropriate.
- ByteX approach
- Classify enquiries using defined business rules, notify the responsible team or person, and retain a searchable record with a clear status.
- Expected outcome
- Enquiries reach the right person faster and more consistently
Internal knowledge assistant
- Business problem
- Staff spend time searching policies, procedures and product documents.
- ByteX approach
- Create a permission-aware assistant that searches approved internal content and shows source references with every answer, so a person can verify what they are told.
- Expected outcome
- Faster information retrieval while preserving existing access controls
Approval-based document processing
- Business problem
- Invoices, forms or operational documents arrive as email attachments and are manually renamed, saved to a folder, keyed into a system and assigned to someone for approval.
- ByteX approach
- Extract the agreed fields from each document, apply business rules such as matching to a purchase order or checking a total, file it consistently, and route anything that fails a rule to a person for review.
- Expected outcome
- Reduced administration on routine documents while keeping oversight of unusual ones