A business colleague, Mark, asked me a question last month that I have now heard three times from three different people.
"Can I use a digital employee to read my email? I just get too much of it."
He runs a nonprofit and an economic development company. We started with one inbox.
Here is what we did not do. We did not move him to a new email platform. We did not build a filing system, write rules, or ask him to change a single habit about how he works. His inbox is exactly where it was that morning.
We gave the reading and triage work to someone else.
Her name is Nova Bennett
She has an address at his domain, the same as anyone else on the team. Every morning she reads the inbox before he does and sends him a brief.
The brief has a shape. One thing that matters most today, and why today. Three moves, each with the reason the timing is now. Anything that needs his review before a deadline. A seven-day look ahead pulled from his calendar and his threads. Then a short list of what she is holding. This is what one looks like.
What Nova is handling
Under every item on his brief is a line that starts with those two words. Monitoring a thread with a county official as a nomination deadline approaches. Tracking a state solicitation in case a new round opens. Sorting and classifying inbox activity daily, flagging what needs him and filtering the rest before tomorrow's brief.
She is not summarizing his email. She is holding his open threads so he does not have to carry them.
At the bottom of every brief is one more line: drafted for review, not sent.
Nothing leaves without him. That was not a feature he asked for. It is how the role should work.
Mark has a human assistant
A good one. Nova did not replace her and was never going to.
The reading and triage work had never been on her desk. It was spread across Mark's mornings in five-minute pieces, which is exactly why it never looked like a job worth staffing.
That is the thing about invisible work. Nobody assigns it because nobody can see it.
Setup took ten minutes
His reply:
"I may never read email again! Thank you!"
Everybody is writing with AI; almost nobody is asking what it can read for me.
Reading and triage is work that eats the first hour of the day. It is one of the easiest roles to assign a Digital Employee.
If you want to see the output before you decide, here is a sample of an email brief.
-Marvin