Agents in the inbox — what works, what doesn't
Two years of iterating on inbox agents: triage, autodraft, autosend. What gets adopted, what falls flat.
The Dench Team
·6 min read
Agents in the inbox
We've shipped three generations of inbox agents. The pattern is clear:
- Triage agents win. Sorting incoming mail into deal-related, support, internal, low-priority is uncontroversial and saves real time.
- Autodraft agents are split. Half of users love them; the other half delete every draft.
- Autosend is dead. Even when the agent is right, the cost of being wrong ("I sent that?!") is too high.
The takeaway: lean into triage. Make autodraft optional and per-thread. Save autosend for transactional emails where the cost of error is bounded.
