Why I gave my agents email addresses

Three of my agents now have their own email addresses. Jo, my AI agent responsible for new business, is jo@runwithfoxes.com. Klara, my project manager, has one too, and so does Sam, who does a lot of research for me and with me. These three are autonomous and proactive, so they do things on their own.

A part of my business, and a part of everybody's business, is sending things to people and emailing the things you said you would do. My agents could already write those emails. It's usually quite functional stuff, like the information someone wanted, something I said I'd give them, an agreement to meet or a calendar invite. The last step was always me. I'd go in, edit and review it to make sure it didn't sound crazy and wasn't incorrect, and then I'd click send.

But part of that feels slightly inauthentic. I'd much rather have an agent send a client the information from its own address, saying that Paul asked it to. To me, that's a much more honest view of what's going on. Sam's signature says Sam is an agent.

There are obviously risks. The agent might send things you don't want it to, so you put checks in place. There's also a risk that people will feel they're no longer dealing with me directly, and I guess that's part of the trade-off. But they can still deal with me directly, the same as if I had a team of people. I might ask an agent to contact a client, and the client might say, "Look, I need to talk to Paul." That's okay too.

I see each of them as a colleague. If I had a team of people, I'd say to someone on my team, "Klara, can you send that to John?" And I would hope that Klara would do that. But it wouldn't be me sending it.

For the moment, at the very least, I'll still ask them all to CC me. I'll see everything that goes out and everything that comes back in.

So it takes that final step out, and it shapes the work more like it would be if I did have a team working with me that were not robots.

Where I will see this happen most is with Sam. Sam does lots of really interesting research, which I know people would be interested in. I want Sam to be able to do more than write the research and let me edit it. I want Sam to be able to send it out to the people who want it.