Get ready for all kinds of email messages flooding your inbox thanks to the increasing use of agentic Artificial Intelligence to create hyper-personalization email campaigns. The same tools are being used by scammers to get you to log into fake accounts.

Artificial Intelligence agents are trained to autonomously create a workflow to discover personal information about a person or company from multiple websites and then create and send emails targeting a single person based on what the research shows. This technique is being used at scale to target thousands of people with an email message intended only for them.  

Agentic AI can plan, research, execute, and adapt in real time, making the resulting sp*m significantly more convincing and dangerous.

Because it’s free to send emails, the people who run these programs have nothing to lose by sending thousands or millions of messages.

An example of Agentic AI Sp*m

Over the past week, I’ve gotten three highly personalized email messages targeting me as an author and naming one of my books. While I don’t know with absolute certainty how these were created, they appear to be agentic AI Sp*m.

The AI Agent used a different Gmail account for each message they sent me. The subject line was something specific to the book they referenced, and the body copy also references ideas in the book.

The agentic AI process to create these emails targeting authors like me might go like this. 1) Have the system locate a book on Amazon. 2) Go to the author’s website. 3) Use the Amazon listing copy, and author website copy to learn about the book. 4) Find the author’s email address. 5) Create an email using the same basic structure, praising the book with book-specific language. 5) Send using different “from” names and email addresses. 6) Repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat some more.

Here are the three emails I received.

What can we do about agentic AI Sp*m?

The first step is to protect yourself. Be aware that these emails are already being sent. If you haven’t received any yet, you will. As always be careful of anything you receive and don’t click on anything you haven’t confirmed.

Perhaps now is the time to revisit an idea I first heard about from Seth Godin. Many years ago, Seth talked about an email “stamp” that senders must purchase via their email provider for every email they send. Perhaps the stamp would cost a cent or a fraction of a cent. For legitimate people or companies, these “stamps” would be a minor cost. However, the bad guys would be put out of business because they rely on sending many thousands of emails to get one reply.