How AI Agents in Email Could Finally Make Automation Work
The promise of AI agents has captivated the tech world, with companies racing to make these tools the next big productivity revolution. But despite the hype, most AI agents remain clunky, unreliable, and disconnected from how real people work every day. From hallucinations and poor collaboration to integration nightmares, AI agents just haven’t lived up to expectations—until now. A new startup called Mixus believes it has found the missing piece: email. By embedding AI agents in email, Mixus is meeting users in the one app they check more than anything else. Could this be the breakthrough that finally makes AI agents useful in real-world workflows?
Image Credits:Mixus
Why AI Agents Aren’t Ready—Yet
Today’s AI agents often sound great in theory but fall apart in practice. Most require developers to string together custom workflows using tools like LangChain, AutoGen, or crewAI—none of which are friendly to the average worker. Even the more accessible options like ChatGPT or Gemini fall short when it comes to real-world use: they can’t work autonomously in teams, often misunderstand tasks, and don’t know when to loop in a human. Experts like Andrej Karpathy and Ali Ghodsi have compared the situation to self-driving cars—it’s not that the technology is useless, but that humans still need to be in the loop. Without a practical interface, AI agents remain an exciting idea that’s hard to implement. This is where AI agents in email could make a real difference by bringing the power of agents to a platform people already know and use.
How Mixus Is Bringing AI Agents to Your Inbox
Founded out of Stanford in late 2024, Mixus is still in beta but already has momentum. The startup has raised $2.6 million in pre-seed funding and landed customers ranging from retailers like Rainbow Shops to finance and tech firms. What sets Mixus apart is its no-code, user-friendly approach. Instead of requiring a developer’s touch, users can simply email instructions to agent@mixus.com—or use chat—to create and run agents that perform single or multi-step tasks. These agents operate directly from your inbox or Slack, eliminating the need to log into a separate app or learn a new tool. “We’re meeting customers where they are today,” says co-founder Elliot Katz. And where are they? On email. That’s why AI agents in email are proving to be such a natural fit for daily work, bridging the gap between advanced automation and everyday usability.
Why AI Agents in Email Could Be the Future of Work
The Mixus model could solve one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption: accessibility. For AI agents to truly succeed in the workplace, they need to be easy to use, easy to trust, and easy to deploy. Email is a perfect platform for all three. It’s already integrated into every business process, offers a built-in layer of human oversight, and doesn't require new habits or steep learning curves. Whether it's processing reports, scheduling tasks, or running workflows, Mixus makes it possible to automate directly from your inbox. And as AI agents become more capable, the ability to control them through something as familiar as email may be what finally pushes them into mainstream use. By focusing on where people actually work, AI agents in email could quietly revolutionize how businesses operate—without the need for a flashy app or complicated interface.
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