Outlook Getting an AI Makeover

Microsoft is planning to reinvent Outlook from the ground up with, you guessed it, AI. Work on the redesign has not yet begun, but Microsoft is determined to reinvent its email client to compete in the "AI era," while supporting the reliability that enterprise users expect of it.

According to an internal memo obtained by The Verge and written by Gaurav Sareen, Microsoft's new corporate vice president of global experiences and platform, Sareen is planning on a fundamental redesign to Outlook rather than an incremental update.

It begins with a reorganization of the Outlook team under new leadership -- namely Sareen -- with a focus on rebuilding the email client for the AI era. "Instead of bolting AI onto legacy experiences, we have the chance to reimagine Outlook from the ground up," Sareen wrote.

He goes on to lay out a vision of how Microsoft is going to transform its email client into more of an assistant that reads your messages, drafts replies, and organizes all of your time, which is somewhat what Copilot already does (or tries to do).

"Think of Outlook as your body double, there for you, so work feels less overwhelming and more doable because you are not facing it alone," Sareen reportedly says in his memo. "With Copilot, this body double becomes even more powerful. Copilot turns Outlook from a set of tools into a partner that acts."

"Next year, every product will claim to be AI native," Sareen writes. "But there will be teams that just slap AI on products and make buzzword complaint claims. And there will be teams that will have actually rebuilt their product and culture from the ground up to make that real. I am betting my leadership that we will be that team."

Now let me tell you why this is a bad idea.

First, what has been outlined is being done already by Copilot. But more important than that, Outlook and email is a form of communication that absolutely should not be automated beyond basic features. It's one thing to send an auto response if you're out of office but it's another thing to have it organizing your inbox and drafting responses. Who knows what will be sent.

I'm sure you will get to edit these draft responses, but people will come to recognize generic, AI generated responses very quickly and we'll come to resent AI responses. Emails personal communication. You expect the person on the compositional end to be writing for you, not spewing off form letters.

So at that point you probably will be rewriting what they generate from you anyway so what's the point? There are some good ideas here, like summarizing long complicated emails but I find the generational side of it to be poorly thought out. As I said, e-mail is personal communication. To get an AI generated response is a bit of an insult and I doubt I'm going to be alone in feeling that way.

If Microsoft wants to prioritize AI revisions to their Office tool suite, they should start with Excel. Excel is more than just a spreadsheet and a number cruncher. It is a tool for data analysis and business intelligence. It is a vastly underrated tool and most people don't realize the power it has. It often serves as a launchpad to teach people how to use data analytics before moving on to more advanced tools like Tableau or Power BI.

Because the promise of agentive AI is automation of menial and repetitive tasks, building AI into Excel for data analysis makes much more sense than generating an e-mail response. I have no doubt that Microsoft has a team already working on Excel, but I would prioritize it over Outlook. Agentive AI can do wonders for Excel. I don't see it doing much for Outlook.

For now, let's see how this all plays out.

Posted by Andy Patrizio on 10/28/2025