By Tom Wozniak, Chief Operating Officer – published on MailCon on 08/18/26
A lot of AI talk in the email industry focuses on how it will help marketers create better content faster than ever before, analyze results and recommend tests, and generally make the email marketing process quicker and easier. All true, but the AI impact on email isn’t all positive for mailers. AI is also making email marketing more complex and challenging for mailers. Here are a few places where AI is changing the playing field for email marketers in unexpected ways.
AI Summaries
Email recipients are familiar with preview text. Many ISPs allow for a line of text to appear in the inbox along with the sender name and subject line. This preview text is determined by the sender. So, as a mailer, you get to decide what text to include in this preview section.
Preview text has its pros and cons for mailers. If the recipient finds the preview text interesting, they might be more likely to open the email. If it isn’t interesting, they may be less likely to open the email. But preview text is really just that – a preview. So, in general, it should help recipients identify interesting emails and then open them for further review. That’s likely a net positive for mailers.
Enter AI summaries. Various ISPs and third-party email apps leverage AI to review the contents of an email when it hits the inbox and provide a summary to the recipient before opening. Sounds a bit like preview text on the surface, but it’s a very different animal.
Preview text is a short introductory phrase or sentence to entice recipients to open the email, written by the mailer. It isn’t a full summary. It’s more of an augmentation to the subject line. AI summaries are full summaries of the email and, being written by an AI rather than the mailer, it adds some challenging variables into the mix.
AI may or may not do a good job of summarizing an email’s content. Some of these tools have shown that they don’t always deliver an accurate summary. Elements like humor can confuse them. Multiple CTAs or a complicated call-to-action may also create issues. Even a straightforward CTA may not come through properly in the summary. If the AI delivers a poorly worded or uninteresting summary, it could depress opens and further engagement from recipients.
A recent study from Validity sheds some interesting light on the impact. Setting aside whether a summary is good or bad, recipients may read it and then decide not to open the email. This drops open rates (a flawed metric, but still directionally useful) and may also depress downstream engagement measures. An engaging AI summary could mean a recipient simply goes off to visit the brand’s website without ever engaging with the email, making attribution for any action they ultimately take difficult to connect back to the email. In either scenario, the email marketer is being negatively impacted by the AI summary.
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Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing, Communications, and overall Operations as the COO for OPTIZMO Technologies.
