What is an AI email assistant for business?
An AI email assistant for business helps teams operate the inbox: classify inbound work, summarise threads, retrieve company knowledge, prepare grounded replies, request approvals, and trigger downstream actions in CRM, tickets, Slack, or Teams. Unlike personal AI inbox tools, it respects team permissions and approval flows.
Capabilities
What you can do with Process Designer
Team inbox, team rules
Designed for shared inboxes, role-based ownership, and approval-aware automation — not single-user productivity.
Grounded in your knowledge
Replies use approved manuals, SOPs, contracts, and operational history. Sources stay visible for review.
Approvals built in
Sensitive replies and system actions can be configured to wait for human sign-off before they run.
Operational actions, not just text
Designed to update CRM, raise tickets, escalate to Slack/Teams, run workflows, or hand off to a browser agent.
Voice and daily briefings
Instruct HEIDI by voice; receive a focused daily view of urgent emails and pending approvals.
Use cases
Where teams apply Process Designer
Real workflows that benefit from visual design, automation, and governance.
Customer A asks an account-specific question
HEIDI summarises the thread, retrieves the contract terms, and drafts a grounded reply for the account owner.
Customer B requests a refund outside policy
HEIDI flags the policy gap, prepares the response, and routes the approval to the named owner before any reply is sent.
A vendor sends an updated invoice for review
HEIDI extracts the changes, prepares the procurement note, and waits for approval before updating the record.
Support queue receives a multi-step technical question
HEIDI assembles the manual + SOP context and prepares a structured answer with sources.
An internal stakeholder asks for a status update
HEIDI summarises the most recent customer threads relevant to the topic so the response is fast and accurate.
How it works
From chaos to clarity in 4 steps
Connect Gmail or Outlook
Designed to connect to existing inboxes — no migration.
Define ground truth
Choose which manuals, SOPs, contracts, and policies HEIDI may use.
Set approval rules
Decide where automation may act and where humans must approve.
Triage and draft
HEIDI classifies, summarises, and prepares grounded drafts with sources.
Approve and trigger
Approve to send, update CRM, raise tickets, or escalate.
Avoid these
Common mistakes (and how to avoid them)
Choosing a personal AI inbox tool for a team workflow
Personal tools optimise individual productivity, not team approvals or shared knowledge.
Pick an assistant designed for shared inboxes, role-based ownership, and approval-aware automation.
Buying an assistant that only drafts replies
The reply is one step. Records, tickets, and channels still need to be updated.
Pick an assistant that connects to operational systems and triggers actions, not just text.
Skipping source visibility
Drafts without visible sources can't be safely approved at scale.
Insist on grounded drafts with the sources that produced them visible to the reviewer.
Team-grade is different from personal
Personal AI inbox tools optimise the individual. Operational email is team work.
Personal AI assistants make a single user faster at writing replies. That's useful, but it's not what teams need when an inbox carries customer outcomes, vendor risk, and revenue decisions.
A business-grade assistant has to handle:
- shared inboxes with multiple owners
- approval rules that depend on policy or risk
- access to company knowledge that not everyone should see
- connected actions across CRM, tickets, Slack, and Teams
- audit-friendly records of what was answered, by whom, with which sources
This is the gap HEIDI Workspace closes.