Using AI to respond to an email

Not all emails are of equal importance. In amongst the sea of newsletters that you don't read, the emails that you've been cc'd in on for political reasons, and the messages from foreign princes looking for help getting their fortunes out of the country, you'll find some emails that are worth a bit of effort. Like the new business inquiry from a dream client or the nightmare client that wants a six-day job done by tomorrow lunchtime. These kinds of emails require some effort. They should be personalized and informative, and that's something that this prompt can really help you with. By using AI assistance to craft well-thought-out, personalized and informative responses, you'll be able to engage with those important emails far more effectively. The AI can help you generate ideas and refine your message, ensuring that your response stands out and leaves a positive impression. So here we are in Microsoft's Edge browser. First of all, I want to show you how to bring up the AI chat. You go up to the top right hand corner, you'll see a little speech bubble with the Bing logo in it. You just roll over that and up comes the window. Simple as that. That's it. We're done. Now, we go into this chat window and we are going to turn it into creative mode. There's three different modes here; creative, balanced, and precise. We're going to use creative mode because we're wanting it to create a nice warm email. Now in the bottom here, we are going to paste in our prompt. I will read it to you here. "You are an eloquent and professional executive known for your effective and persuasive communications. I want you to help me respond to this {email}. Write in a conversational and professional manner with a touch of wit and charm. When you are pasting a link, double-check it by visiting the link yourself to make sure it's active. If it's a dead link, try again until you find a working one." That little bit at the end there is just improve the chances of us getting a dead link. We may still get one, but this will increase the chances of us getting an active, proper link. We need to check these things, of course. Then we say, "I want you to:" and below that we will put a bullet points of the different things that we want to be covered off in the email. Okay. So here's kind of the structure. Here's the things we want to get covered off. Write as bullet points, it doesn't have to be in great English. It doesn't matter. That's what the chatbot is going to sort out. Then email. We're going to paste in the email we got from the client. So let's do that right now. Let's paste in the email that we have here from our imaginary client. It says here, "Hello Dave, I'm writing to let you know that we're having to push the timeline up. I now need you to deliver your report ready for me to present tomorrow lunchtime. I know you thought you had a few more days on this but it's a great opportunity to present to the board. Please confirm that you can make this happen." Okay. Right. Here are the bullet points that I want to put in there. So I shall replace this list of requests with the bullet points. "Thank you, delighted you've found this opportunity to present to the board," blah, blah, blah. But what we're going to do here is we're asking two things that Bing needs to get live data for. The first is, "Share a recent article on predictions about how AI will positively impact the workplace and say something insightful about it." Great. The next is, "Then find out what the weather is like in Manchester today and make a comment about how it might affect their work or commute." Let's see what this does. Great. So it's given us a response here. First of all, it says, "Hello Robyn, thank you for your email. I'm delighted to hear that you've found this opportunity to present our project to the board. That's fantastic news." Great. This is ready. It's sounding good. It's enthusiastic. That's what we want. "However, the new timeline means that we can't give you the presentation we were hoping for." Blah, blah, blah. Right. So it fills out all of that stuff. Next thing we need to do is check this link that it gives us here. Is this a live link? And at this point we check it, and it says that "No. It's not a live link." So we will deal with that in a second. Then we've got "By the way, how is the weather in Manchester today? I heard it was raining heavily. I hope that doesn't affect your work or commute too much. I know how frustrating it can be to deal with traffic jams and wet clothes." That's nice. I like that. So it's using live data about the weather in Manchester, which it is indeed raining in Manchester today, as it very often does most days that I've been in Manchester. Right. So let's say here, "The article link you gave me doesn't work. Please find another more recent article. and write me an insightful paragraph about it for the email." Here we go. Great. Let's have a look at this article that it's given us. We will see if this is a live article. Okay. Now, this appears to be a government study from the UK government. There we go. The potential impact of AI on UK employment and the demand for skills. Okay. So it's a government study. That's quite interesting. And it then says here, "This article is based on a research report that estimates the potential impact of AI and related technologies on the UK labour market. I think this article highlights the importance of our project in preparing for the future of work." So at this point, we're saying why this is relevant to the client. Now we just need to take this and add this into our email to replace what we've already got. So it's good that I've been able to show you a broken link to show you how we can deal with that, because actually, it's really great what it's come up with here when we asked it to do the job again. So I'm really happy with this email. What this prompt has given me is far better than most emails that I receive. So maybe play with this to create a template that feels right to you and then start wowing your customers, your colleagues, and those foreign princes with money problems.