These AI Tools Will Help Sort Your Post-Vacation Inbox

While planning a nine-day trip to Japan with her family earlier this spring, Lindsey Scrase was anxious to avoid the stress of work piling up in her absence. For most of her career, getting away has inevitably meant back-to-back catch-up meetings and an overflowing inbox upon return. "I want to really unplug this time," she said before the 11-hour flight. So for the first time, the chief operating officer at Checkr Inc., a San Francisco-based background-screening company, decided to outsource the slog of reentry to artificial intelligence.

Not too long ago, most white-collar workers could head out on vacation without fearing the email hangover that awaited them-originally, because messages weren't accessible on everyone's phones yet and, even after, because 9-to-5 boundaries were better established. But today's always-on workplace cultures-accelerated by the rise of remote work-have blurred those lines. Now a growing number of companies have rolled out tools designed to quickly catch up busy managers and staff who (gasp!) mute alerts on holiday. Microsoft Corp.'s Copilot, one of the most prominent offerings, costs users $30 a month, while Google's Gemini and Atlassian Corp.'s Rovo are bundled with enterprise subscriptions; the latter now counts 1.5 million monthly AI users, up 50% from the previous quarter.

"One of the barriers to taking vacation is you don't want to miss things or be a bottleneck," says Melanie Rosenwasser, chief people officer at Dropbox Inc., which has expanded beyond its core file-storage business into AI offerings, including ones that help with post-vacation reentry. "These tools remove some of that guilt." (Never much of a vacationer before adopting the tools herself, she recently took a five-day trip to Tampa, Florida, for Yankees spring training.)

Sandra Humbles, chief learning officer at pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, says AI has helped her draw firmer boundaries around work for about a year now. "I've got 30% of my time back," she says, crediting Copilot with automating tasks like email triage and project planning. The shift has made it easier for Humbles, who lives in Dallas, to log off fully during weekends and time off. "You get back up to speed in 10 minutes." Humbles credits her "digital specialist"-a younger, tech-savvy colleague whom others might call an executive assistant-for helping her adopt the tools early.

Some executives have pressure-tested AI tools over even longer breaks. When Erin DeCesare, chief technology officer at office catering company ezCater Inc. in Boston, took a six-week sabbatical from Thanksgiving to New Year's, she started her catch-up process by giving AI startup Glean Technologies Inc.'s tool a simple prompt: "Give me a synopsis of all my key team Slack channels and meeting transcripts-what's still outstanding, what are people worried about?" She followed up with several additional prompts to the bot, which had access to her messaging platforms and documents. Soon, DeCesare had a one-page readout of key decisions made while she was out, as well as a sentiment analysis of her colleagues' communications that allowed her to quickly figure out what was most urgent. "I knew what to prioritize from Day 1," she says. "That gave me a ton of peace of mind."

The market for AI productivity tools was valued at almost $9 billion last year and is projected to surpass $36 billion globally by 2030, according to Grand View Research Inc. It's just one of the millions of ways, big and small, that AI is changing the way we do our jobs. Still, despite the buzz, overall adoption of such products remains limited: Just 16% of American workers say they use AI on the job, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Not everyone wants AI reading all their correspondence, for one. For workers handling sensitive or confidential information-such as HR professionals, legal teams or client-facing executives-the idea of such a tool combing through private messages raises red flags about data exposure and compliance risk. Also a challenge: AI tools still struggle with tone, sarcasm and context, making it risky to have them summarize threads or suggest responses.

And even the most advanced programs have blind spots, especially in fast-moving workplaces where not every conversation is recorded (which, some would argue, isn't necessarily a bad thing). For AI to work smoothly, key meetings need to be transcribed, and decisions must be captured in places the tools can actually read, not at watercoolers or in hallways where they may be hashed out. DeCesare says she realized the AI missed things shared only in direct conversations, such as employee successes, so she created a dedicated teamwide kudos channel on Slack where workers could post achievements, allowing the AI to gather not only what's going sideways but also what's going well. The process saved time, she says. "What was amazing about this is that none of my team had to put status updates together for me," DeCesare says. "That would've been a huge lift for the team in the past."

For Scrase, Checkr's COO, trialing the tools during her Japan trip paid off. AI summarized her Slack threads and calls, helping her jump back into work quickly. It also proved to be a savvy assistant even outside the office-where it planned parts of the trip itself, she says, down to which side of the train to sit on for the best views of Mount Fuji.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)