Meet PIE & Why We Think Email Is The Future of AI

AI continues to get smarter on a weekly basis and at an exponential rate, but the most important thing for AI to be useful to billions of people is context.  I’m not talking about the context length window, but rather context as the data that we input into AI.  Every AI has a knowledge cutoff and while the ability to feed real-time search data to AI is helpful, it still lacks the most important context - personal context.  

By knowing as much about a person and their work as possible, we can realize a truly agentic future where AI becomes able to execute most of our day to day productivity tasks.  Personal context is the force multiplier that makes AI agents a reality.  I like to think of it as a simple equation  (LLM capability + tooling capability) * personal context = AI Utility.  This goes far beyond a personal assistant, as a human personal assistant is bound by time, whereas software is not.  If personal context is a force multiplier, then where can we get it from? 

Email.  Your inbox is not a list of messages, but an unstructured database chock full of personal information to help AI realize its potential.  Contacts, documents, personal relationships, meetings, and more.  There is no other central repository more important and powerful than an individual’s inbox for both work and personal.  Emails death has been proclaimed many times over the past 20 years, but it has only gotten stronger and more widespread.  The problem is the data and personal context inside your inbox has been locked away due to its highly unstructured nature.  Thankfully AI is the perfect solution to working with highly unstructured data. 

This is why we built PIE (short for Personal Intelligence Engine),  the DO IT ALL executive assistant powered by the personal context of your inbox.  PIE connects to your inbox, makes sense of the unstructured data in your inbox, and turns it into personal context that can be made useful by our personal assistant. Email is an interface that everyone uses on a daily basis, which means PIE just works out of the box in the background when it sees a new email or when you email it directly to complete a task.

As of today your PIE assistant already has an incredible amount of capabilities with more being added all the time.  It personally saves me hours every single day.  Here are some of my favorite things PIE does for me.

Task Extraction - PIE extracts actionable tasks from both my email AND meetings it listens in on to create an active todo list for me.  What’s neat is that the daily email summary shows me my new and outstanding todos, which I can mark as complete right from my inbox. 

3x A Day Email Digest - Everyday at 8 am, 3pm, and 9pm, PIE sends me an email with an overview of what happened in my inbox I can just read instead of constantly checking my inbox.  It has urgent items, a summary attachments, newsletter summaries, and even my full todo list.

Meeting Attendee Dossiers - Before every meeting, PIE will send you a detailed Dossier on all the attendees.  It gets their picture, work history, and even searches the web for relevant news links about the person.  It gives you common discussion points too.

Making phone calls - You can email PIE and it will call someone for you directly.  One evening it ordered pizza for me.  Just give it the name of the business and it will look it up too.

Deep Research Reports - Need competition analysis or travel plans for work?  PIE will create a deep research report for you and email it to you with citations.  It even creates a supplemental powerpoint that it attaches to the email back.

Attending Meetings - PIE will attend meetings for you on any conferencing platform.  It will take notes and then send you an email afterwards with the full summary, transcript, and to-dos.

Schedule & send calendar invites - Loop PIE into a meeting and it will send calendar invites to everyone on the thread.  It also has the full context of your calendar when creating an automatic email draft.

Cleaning my inbox - PIE cleans your inbox for you.  We apply labels automatically and also auto archive emails you don’t need.  You can even create Stacks, which can have custom criteria like “Anything related to our Series A round”.

Write Emails For Me In My Tone - When you sign up, PIE analyzes hundreds of previous emails you’ve sent to create a full tone & style guide.  We then take all of your personal context along with the email thread to create email drafts for you automatically.

Listening to podcasts for me.  - I love podcasts, but I don’t have time to listen to them. Just email PIE that you want to subscribe to a podcast.  It will listen to it, send you the main points, and the full transcript.  It’s a cheat code.

It’s my Receptionist.  PIE has its own incoming number for your inbox.  Give it out on forms and anywhere you want.  It will send you an email with the summary and the person’s contact info.  You can also specify situations where you want it to hand the call off to you.

These have been fun to build and we’ll certainly release more as fast as we can.  The end game for PIE is a platform where anyone can extend its functionality to build tools that make use of someone’s personal context.  Those tools can be private for internal use or public for anyone to use.  

I’m excited to be building PIE not only as a founder, but an engineer due to my obsession with email.  Over 16 years ago I wrote a highly popular blog post called “Email Is Serious Business” https://www.jasonlbaptiste.com/email-newsletters-business/ and have been obsessed with it ever since as a business.  It’s also an open protocol, which lowers platform risk and is why it has lived on while other platforms have declined. 

Try PIE today at https://mailtopie.com/?share_code=5a3fd605c5ad535d0067a77725f16d6f feel free to email me at [email protected] OR call my assistant at to share your thoughts/questions at 914.415.5722