Time yourself replying to a routine email tomorrow: something like confirming a meeting or answering a question you've answered before. Typical result: three to five minutes, most of it spent not on deciding what to say but on producing sentences. Multiply by the dozens of routine replies in a professional week and you've found where a large share of the McKinsey-measured 2.6 daily email hours actually hides: in the blank reply box.
What AI drafting actually does
An AI drafting tool reads the thread (the question asked, the history, the attachments mentioned) and produces a complete reply for you to edit or approve. The work changes category: composition becomes review, and review of a decent draft takes seconds. For the routine majority of replies (confirmations, scheduling, status answers, polite declines) the draft is usually sendable with light edits.
"In your voice," concretely
Voice matching is pattern learning from your sent mail: how you open ("Hi Anna" vs "Anna,"), sentence length, formality level, whether you soften refusals or state them, your sign-off. A generic template reads like a form letter and costs you a rewrite; a voice-matched draft reads like a fast version of you and costs a skim. This is the difference between drafting tools people abandon and ones they keep: the edit distance on each draft.
The dividing line
Some replies shouldn't be delegated even though they could be: hard feedback, apologies, negotiations, condolences, anything where the relationship outweighs the words. A workable test from our delegation guide: if the recipient would feel differently knowing a machine wrote it, write it yourself. Everything below that line is fair game, and most volume lives below the line.
The habit that keeps it safe
Every draft gets your eyes before it sends. No exceptions, including the follow-up chasers. This is partly about catching the occasional wrong assumption in a draft, and mostly about remaining the sender of record in the eyes of everyone you correspond with. Pidgy is built on this rule: it drafts replies in your voice and queues its follow-ups, and nothing leaves without your click. The minutes come back; the authorship doesn't leave.
