AI Agent Bites #2: Email as Knowledge Base

The problem we solve

Emails contain valuable insights and communication patterns, but manually extracting this information is time-consuming and inconsistent. Employees often struggle to find relevant data across long email threads, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

While search functions help, they fall short in understanding context and identifying key patterns. To solve this, we use a prompt-driven AI approach to automatically summarize emails, extract insights, and recognize communication trends, streamlining the process and improving overall productivity.

How it works

Input:

• Emails extracted from your inbox via Thunderbird, Google Apps Script, or Takeout
• Uploaded to OpenAI’s Vector Store through the Assistants API

Processing:

• Emails are embedded and stored
• Natural language queries are matched contextually

Output:

• Direct answers to inbox queries
• Thread summaries
• Extracted insights, displayed through a Streamlit interface

Complexity:

Example screenshots

Impact

• Saves ~10 hours/week per user
• Boosts productivity and email response efficiency
• Reduces manual email management tasks

Built with

• OpenAI Assistants API + Vector Store + GPT 4o-mini
• Streamlit Python framework for UI
• Thunderbird / Google Apps Script for email extraction

Complexity

• Medium

Looking to leverage modern AI tools within your company? Get in touch and explore next steps.

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