EmailTalk

Why not hand every email to AI, from the first build to the final send? It would be faster. It would also give you twenty different versions of your brand, headlines that run past the character limit, and nobody accountable when something goes out wrong.

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey take on the "just AI everything" pitch that's all over LinkedIn. Elliot starts with a real test: he connected Claude to his Gmail and had it unsubscribe inboxes from everything they'd signed up to. It cleared weeks of work, but it still came back with a handful of failures per person to sort out by hand.

Joe explains why email design systems, the pre-approved building blocks that keep a brand consistent, are turning into the guardrails AI needs. A prompt or a skill can describe your brand, but a design system with validation rules can enforce it. That matters when an LLM can't reliably count to forty characters. The question now isn't whether AI can build an email. It's how you keep 200 agents building for your brand without drifting off it.

Will brings in what CRM teams are telling us: junior builds that look fine and then break in the inbox, taped-together workflows that leave every email slightly off-brand, and how much nuance you'd have to teach a model before it gets things right.

They also ask whether every email will end up looking the same, why AI should raise standards rather than cut corners, and which jobs nobody should be doing by hand anymore, like checking every link in 16 languages or copying and pasting all day.

In this episode:

• Letting Claude loose on an inbox
• Why not just AI everything?
• Email design systems as guardrails for AI
• Skills vs validation rules: describing your brand vs enforcing it
• Keeping 200 AI agents on-brand
• Accountability: "the agents did it" isn't an answer
• AI doesn't replace humans, it shows where they're invaluable
• Ask AI for the process, not just the output

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you keep hearing that AI can do the lot, this episode gives you a better question to ask: where does your team add value, and what does AI need from you to stay on brand?

What would you do with the time AI gives back? Tell us in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/

Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/

EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/

ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/

AI will tell you it's right whether it is or not. So how does an email team work out what to hand over, what to check, and what to keep?

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey look at trust in AI for email marketing and CRM teams. Elliot has just come back from Ogilvy's Nudgestock, where this year's theme was trust in the digital age. That sets up the conversation: how you learn when to trust AI output and when not to, and why this change is harder to manage than mobile or GDPR ever were.

Will talks about the themes coming out of CRM teams at the moment, Joe explains why AI is most useful in work you already know well. They also look at why AI can speed up an email build and still leave you with the same QA time at the end.

In this episode:

• The pattern this week: teams building their own AI tools vs teams doing nothing at all
• Nudgestock, Rory Sutherland and trust in the digital age
• How do you learn to trust AI, and when to stop?
• "AI doesn't replace humans, it surfaces what's irreplaceable"
• Using AI where you're the expert vs where you're not
• If you tried ChatGPT two years ago and gave up, try again
• Skills, context and codifying what "on brand" means
• Does AI save time if you still have to check its homework?
• The human sandwich: human, AI, human

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe or any other ESP, and you're working out how far to trust AI with your campaigns, this episode gives you a practical way to test it: try it first on the work you know best.

Tell us about the best time AI lied to you. Drop it in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/

Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/

EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/

ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/

For about a decade the email playbook was close to a solved problem: build the components, follow the process, ship the campaign. AI has reopened all of it, and the interesting part is that there's no longer one right answer for what an email team should look like.

EmailTalk is back. Six years after the first series, Elliot Ross restarts the show with Joe Cottam and Will Harvey to work out where email marketing, CRM and lifecycle actually stand now.

Elliot runs ActionRocket, the independent CRM creative agency, and co-founded Taxi for Email, built in 2016 after a client asked for 800 emails in 20 languages and balked at the five-million-pound quote. Taxi sold to SparkPost in 2021, then MessageBird, now Bird. Joe Cottam was on the engineering team through that acquisition, worked on MessageBird's ESP and email builder, and went on to co-found EmailShepherd. Will Harvey joined this year from consulting and sales, and is on the show to ask what any of it means for the person who has to get a campaign out on a Tuesday.

In this episode:

• Why reboot Email Talk now
• Elliot Ross: ActionRocket, and how Taxi for Email started with an 800-email problem
• Joe Cottam: from Taxi engineering to building EmailShepherd
• Will Harvey: the customer's voice in the room
• How email quietly became a solved problem in the 2010s
• Marketers now expected to lead on AI without an AI background
• Why there are multiple right answers instead of one
• Technology used to be the guardrail. Now it moulds around your team
• Email design systems, MCP and what's newly possible
• The bits you shouldn't hand to AI — starting with accountability
• Against the "I automated 100% of everything, want my prompt ebook?" crowd
• What's coming: practitioner voices, and the pitfalls people didn't see coming

If you run email or CRM at a brand, whether in Klaviyo, Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe or any other ESP,  and the AI conversation has left you unsure whether you're behind, this is the reassuring version. Nobody is as far ahead as LinkedIn suggests.

We're not claiming to have it worked out. What we do want is the real questions: what you're stuck on, what you tried, and what went sideways. That's what we'll take into the next episodes.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/

Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/

EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/

ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Jay here:
https://twitter.com/emailjay_

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Paul here:
https://twitter.com/Paul_Airy
https://www.beyondtheenvelope.co.uk/

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/
— Mike Davidson — Superhuman is Spying on You
— Hey.com 

Join Dylan here:
https://twitter.com/dylanatsmith
https://dylanatsmith.com/

Join Jacques here:
https://twitter.com/iamacyborg
https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com

Join Jay here:
https://twitter.com/emailjay_
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayoram/

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Crystal here:
https://twitter.com/sentbycrystal
https://www.linkedin.com/in/crystal-ledesma/
https://medium.com/@sentbycrystal

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Dan here:
https://danoshinsky.com/
http://inboxcollective.com/
http://notanewsletter.com/
https://twitter.com/danoshinsky
https://www.linkedin.com/in/danoshinsky/

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Gavin here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavin-laugenie-67b9555/
https://twitter.com/Gavygav
https://www.instagram.com/gavygav/

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/

— Our sponsor: Taxi for Email helps your team make their best email — find out more here https://taxiforemail.com/

Join Chad here:
http://www.emailmarketingrules.com/
https://twitter.com/chadswhite
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chadswhite/

Email Marketing Rules: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072C5HGTG/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B072C5HGTG&linkCode=as2&tag=retailblogsp-20&linkId=5a54cadc1bf5736a66d22dd0a960ab4e

Join us for more #EmailTalk:
https://www.emailtalk.fm/
https://twitter.com/email_talk

Join Elliot here:
http://elliot-ross.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/iamelliot
https://www.instagram.com/emailelliot/