Build model
Fixed scope
automate operations
Email automation: first reply in 30 seconds
AI triage reads, tags, and drafts every reply inside Gmail or Outlook — your team approves and sends. Built on n8n + Claude; first responses drop from hours to seconds, and 78% of buyers pick the first responder.
Timeline
2–8 weeks
Runtime
Monitored
Handover
Owned by your team
Delivery blueprint
Visual summary of what this build includes from quote to handover.
Scope
Written
Deliverables and acceptance checks are fixed before build.
Execution
Instrumented
Retries, logs, and alerts are configured for production.
Controls
Approved
High-risk actions are gated by named human approvers.
Transfer
Owned
Runbook and account ownership move to your team at launch.
Your inbox is a queue nobody manages
The average B2B lead waits 42 hours for a reply — and 38% never hear back at all. Meanwhile 78% of buyers pick the company that responds first. If your first reply takes 6 hours, the deal was decided before anyone opened the thread.
Inside the inbox, triage is invisible work. Someone reads every message just to decide who handles it. Order status, invoice copies, “did you get my form?” — around 65% of routine inquiries can resolve with no human touch (typical for this type of automation). Your team answers them by hand anyway, roughly 2 hours a day per rep.
What we build into your inbox
Inbox triage + routing
Every inbound email classified in seconds — sales, support, billing, spam — then tagged, assigned to an owner, and Slack-alerted when it’s urgent. The unread pile becomes a routed queue.
n8n · Claude · Gmail · Slack
AI-drafted replies, human-approved
Claude drafts responses in your voice, grounded in your docs and pricing, and drops them in the drafts folder. Your team reviews, edits, sends. Auto-send only for categories you explicitly approve.
Claude · Gmail · Outlook
Behavior-based follow-up sequences
Reminders fire on what the lead actually did — opened the quote, went quiet for 3 days — not on a rep’s memory. Every touch logged to the CRM with its trigger.
n8n · HubSpot · Resend
ROI math
2 hrs/day × $40/hr × 250 workdays = $20,000/yr per inbox — typical build $3–6k
Typical for this type of automation — the inbox audit swaps these for your real volume, categories, and response times.
How this ships
Week 1
Audit — read the inbox data
Inbox breakdown: volume by category, current first-reply times, automation candidates
Week 2
Blueprint — design the triage
Triage taxonomy, draft-approval flow, escalation rules, and a fixed written quote
Weeks 3–4
Build — shadow mode first
Triage + drafting live in shadow mode on real mail, then switched on category by category
FAQ
What does email automation cost?
Triage plus AI drafting is typically a $3–6k fixed build; adding behavior-based sequences and CRM logging moves it toward the $6–20k multi-system band. You get a fixed written quote after a free audit. Ongoing cost is tool fees only — typically $40–180/mo including AI usage.
How long before it’s handling real email?
Live in 30 days. Shadow mode starts around week 3: the system tags and drafts while your team works normally, so you see its accuracy on your actual messages before a single email sends.
Does it work with Gmail and Outlook?
Yes — Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook, and Microsoft 365, through their official APIs. Drafts appear in your normal drafts folder, so approval happens where your team already works. Help-desk tools like Zendesk or Front slot in the same way.
Is our email safe? Does the AI train on it?
Messages are processed through API calls, and on the Anthropic API business data is not used to train models by default. Credentials stay encrypted in your own self-hosted n8n instance, and we work through scoped accounts you can revoke at any time.
Get a fixed quote for email automation
Fill this quick form and we’ll send a fixed written quote for this exact build.