# AI Email Triage Workflow

A step-by-step recipe for triaging a shared inbox (support@, info@, hello@) with an AI assistant. It classifies every email, names who should handle it, and drafts a reply when a reply is safe to draft. It works with any capable AI assistant: ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

## Prerequisites

- Access to the shared inbox you want to triage
- Any capable AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini all work)
- 20-30 recent emails from that inbox, copied somewhere you can paste from
- A clear answer to "who on the team owns what" — if that is fuzzy, settle it first

## Step 1: Pick your categories

Pull the last 30 emails and sort them by hand. Most shared inboxes settle into five to seven categories: sales inquiries, support questions, billing, vendors, internal, spam. Keep the list short. If two categories always route to the same person, merge them.

## Step 2: Fill in the routing rules template

Copy this template and replace every bracket. "Safe to draft" means a category where a wrong draft costs you nothing because a human reviews it and the stakes are low.

```
ROUTING RULES for [COMPANY NAME]

SALES → [name or role]. Safe to draft: yes. Drafts should always include: [e.g., a link to book a call]
SUPPORT → [name or role]. Safe to draft: yes, for how-to questions only. Escalate anything that sounds like a bug or a complaint.
BILLING → [name or role]. Safe to draft: no.
VENDOR → [name or role]. Safe to draft: no.
INTERNAL → forward to the person named, no reply needed.
SPAM → archive, no reply.
```

## Step 3: Set up the triage prompt

Paste the prompt below into your AI assistant. Replace everything in brackets. If your assistant supports saved instructions (custom GPTs, Claude Projects, Gemini Gems), save it there so you only paste emails, not the whole prompt.

```
You are the email triage assistant for [COMPANY NAME], a [ONE-LINE DESCRIPTION OF THE BUSINESS].

For the email below, do four things:

1. CLASSIFY. Assign exactly one category:
   - SALES: a prospect asking about products, pricing, or availability
   - SUPPORT: an existing customer with a question or problem
   - BILLING: invoices, payments, refunds, account changes
   - VENDOR: suppliers, partners, or service providers
   - INTERNAL: from our own team
   - SPAM: cold outreach, newsletters, anything irrelevant
   [EDIT THIS LIST TO MATCH YOUR CATEGORIES FROM STEP 1]

2. RATE URGENCY. High (needs action today), Normal (this week), or Low (no deadline). Say why in one clause.

3. ROUTE. Using the routing rules below, name who handles this email.

4. DRAFT OR FLAG. If the category is marked "safe to draft" in the rules, write a reply in our voice: [TWO OR THREE ADJECTIVES, e.g., "warm, direct, no corporate filler"]. If not, write "HUMAN REQUIRED" plus one sentence on what the handler needs to know.

Hard rules:
- Never invent order numbers, prices, dates, names, or policy details. If a reply needs a fact you do not have, leave a [BLANK] in its place.
- If you are torn between two categories, pick the more urgent one and note the uncertainty.

Output format:
Category:
Urgency:
Route to:
Draft or flag:

ROUTING RULES:
[PASTE YOUR COMPLETED ROUTING RULES HERE]

EMAIL (including sender and subject line):
[PASTE EMAIL HERE]
```

## Step 4: Test before you trust

Run your 20-30 already-handled emails through the prompt one at a time. Compare each output to what your team actually did. When the AI disagrees with the human, decide who was right. If the AI keeps miscategorizing the same type of email, the fix is almost always a sharper category definition, not a smarter model. Edit and rerun until you would act on the output without wincing.

## Step 5: Make it a routine

Batch it: once or twice a day, someone pastes new emails through the prompt, sends the good drafts after reading them, and forwards the flagged ones. Two rules that keep this safe: a human reads every draft before it sends, and nothing is ever auto-sent from this recipe.

## QA checklist

- Every email gets exactly one category
- No draft contains an invented fact — spot-check for made-up order numbers and dates
- Urgent emails were actually urgent, in your judgment
- Anyone on the team can run the routine, not just the person who set it up

## When this outgrows DIY

Copy-paste triage is a fine way to prove the value. It stops being fine when the volume makes the pasting itself a chore, or when you want every inbound email processed automatically, wired into your helpdesk or CRM, with logging and escalation you can audit. That is a build, not a prompt. That is the kind of system agentclaw installs — start with a free audit at agentclawhq.com/book.