Gmail's New AI Feature Will Write Your Emails for You

Happy Saturday :)

As the warmer weather starts to roll in (at least for us in the northern hemisphere), momentum in the AI space only continues to grow.

This week:

• Gmail launches an AI feature that will write your emails for you
• How to Build a Digital Marketing F1 Team
• Reading List: The Pyramid Principle - Logic in Writing and Thinking

Gmail launches an AI feature that will write your emails for you

How will Help Me Write work in Gmail?

The new "Help Me Write" feature for generative AI email creation in Gmail will expand on the "Smart Compose" feature that Google introduced in 2018, as well as the "Smart Reply" feature added in 2017.

Whereas Smart Reply offers basic automated replies, and Smart Compose provides suggestions as you type, Help Me Write will go beyond, creating a full email from a basic prompt. A "refine" button can shorten the text, elaborate, or make the email more formal. You can then further edit the email manually or send it as is.

In his demo at Google I/O, Pichai used Help Me Write to draft an email asking for a full refund from an airline for a canceled flight. Help Me Write created an email from scratch using information from the airline's emailed voucher offer.

When will "Help Me Write be" available to all Gmail users?

"Help Me Write" has been used by Google Docs and Gmail testers since March, and a similar group of Google testers will start using AI helpers for Google Sheets and Google Slides in June.

Pichai said that Help Me Write will officially launch to Google users with an update to Google Workspace, but there is no firm timetable yet.

How useful will this be?

For short mundane emails, it will be great. Time will only tell on how much specific context the model will absorb from your personal or corporate inbox in generating responses - which I think will be the real game-changer here.

How to Build a Digital Marketing F1 Team

I had the privilege of presenting at the Istanbul Marketing Summit in the Winter of 2019 on how to build, scale, and manage a cross-functional marketing team. Below is the presentation recording, a copy of the slides, and the three key takeaways:

Slides:

3 Key Takeaways:?

1. Define the core habits of your team.?

• ?What reports, presentations, and meetings are always scheduled in your calendar??
• ?Do they add any value to the core reason your team exists
• ?- If not, then why are you doing this?

2. Cut PowerPoint and bs meetings and move to Word. It will change your life.

3. Have a forum for constant learning and sharing in your team. Make sure you never cancel this meeting. Because not doing this means not innovating.

The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto

A former manager (thank you, Ankur Chaudhary !) gave me this book, and I believe will greatly benefit anyone who writes or presents on a specific topic (basically, almost everyone in business!). It's called "The Pyramid Principle," and it offers valuable insights on structuring ideas coherently and engaging your audience effectively.

One of the book's key lessons is capturing and maintaining your audience's interest. By introducing new and intriguing information, you can keep them engaged and spark their curiosity. This leads to active participation, with listeners asking questions and seeking more from you. "The Pyramid Principle" also delves into vertical and horizontal logic concepts, explaining how they can present information clearly and logically.

Example use of the Pyramid, detailing why someone should compost:

The book also emphasizes the significance of storytelling, highlighting an introductory flow structure consisting of situation, complication, question, and answer. It advocates grouping and summarizing supporting arguments, forming a pyramid under a single thought that answers the main question. You can effectively focus on core issues by following different types of order, such as time order, structural order, and degree order.

Often when we are too engrossed in our day-to-day, we assume that everyone has the detail they need to make decisions that seem rational and logical to us. The framework helps structure your thoughts and understand your stakeholder's needs to move forward. So rather than starting to write the email or open a blank PowerPoint, I find it useful to use a whiteboard or a blank sheet of paper to use the Pyramid Principles and breakdown the problem/opportunity at hand and then get started on how I will present my case to move forward. This has saved me a tremendous amount of time!

Thanks for this reading this week's Applied Intelligence Newsletter. Please let me know how you found it and give me any other feedback by commenting below. Have a great weekend, and see you next week!