Choosing Your AI Email Tools
You do not need five different subscriptions to write great emails with AI. You need one or two tools you understand well and can reach for without thinking. This lesson walks through the main options available in 2026, what each one is genuinely good at, and how to pick a setup that fits how you actually work, whether that is inside your inbox, in a separate chat window, or across a team.
The two ways to use AI for email
Broadly, you will use AI for email in one of two modes. The first is chat mode: you open a separate app such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, type a prompt describing the email you need, and copy the result into your email client. This is the most flexible approach because you can iterate freely, ask follow-up questions, and paste in long threads for context without any plugin limitations. The second is inbox mode: an AI assistant built directly into your email client, such as Copilot in Outlook, Gemini in Gmail, or a third-party extension, which drafts replies in place without you leaving your inbox. Inbox mode is faster for routine replies. Chat mode gives you more control and works better for anything important, complex or high-stakes, such as a sales pitch or a difficult apology.
Most confident AI email users end up doing both: chat mode for anything that matters, inbox mode for the twenty small replies a day that do not need much thought.
The main tools compared
| Tool | Best for | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | General drafting, brainstorming subject lines, fast iteration | Web, desktop and mobile app; browser extensions |
| Claude (Anthropic) | Long, nuanced drafts, careful tone control, handling long pasted threads | Web, desktop app, and integrations such as Slack |
| Gemini (Google) | Drafting and summarising directly inside Gmail and Google Workspace | Built into Gmail, Docs and the Gemini app |
| Microsoft Copilot | Drafting and summarising directly inside Outlook and Word | Built into Outlook, Teams and the Microsoft 365 suite |
None of these is objectively the best for every person. If your company already runs on Google Workspace, Gemini inside Gmail will save you the most clicks because it can read the thread you are replying to without any copy-pasting. If you are on Microsoft 365, the same logic applies to Copilot in Outlook. If you want the strongest standalone writing and editing partner, regardless of what email client you use, ChatGPT and Claude are both excellent, with Claude generally regarded as slightly more careful with nuance and long context, and ChatGPT slightly faster and more widely integrated with other apps.
Free versus paid
Every major tool offers a usable free tier, and for most people learning the basics in this course, the free tier is genuinely enough. Paid tiers, typically twenty pounds or dollars a month, buy you higher usage limits, access to the most capable underlying model, faster responses at busy times, and in some cases the ability to connect the AI directly to your email account so it can read threads automatically. If you write more than a handful of important emails a week, a paid plan pays for itself quickly in time saved. If you only need occasional help, stick with a free tier until you feel the limits.
Privacy and confidentiality: read this before you paste anything
Before you paste a real client email, a contract, or anything containing personal data into any AI tool, check your employer’s policy and the tool’s own data settings. Many paid business tiers of ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot explicitly exclude your conversations from being used to train future models, while free consumer tiers may not. As a simple rule for this course: never paste anything into an AI chat that you would not be comfortable a stranger reading, unless you have specifically confirmed your plan and settings protect that data. For sensitive client correspondence, anonymise names, figures and identifying details before pasting, or use your organisation’s approved enterprise AI tool rather than a personal account.
Setting up your workspace
To get the most out of this course, set up two things before the next lesson. First, create a free account with at least one chat-based tool, ChatGPT or Claude are the easiest starting points because neither requires a specific email provider. Second, if your work email runs through Gmail or Outlook, check whether Gemini or Copilot is already available to you through your employer’s subscription, since built-in inbox assistance is worth activating even if you mainly use a separate chat tool for anything important.
A practical starting prompt to test any new tool is: “You are helping me write professional emails. I will describe a situation and you will draft an email for me. Confirm you understand and ask me for the first situation.” This simple instruction primes the AI to behave like a drafting assistant rather than a general chatbot, and it is a good way to get a feel for how each tool responds before you commit real work to it.
Once you have a tool set up, the next lesson breaks down the actual structure of a great email, the parts every strong message has in common, and how to describe that structure to an AI so your prompts consistently produce usable drafts rather than generic filler.
