Cold email with AI — what works in 2026
GPT can write a cold email in 5 seconds. The hard part is what happens before the writing — research, personalisation, list quality.
People think cold email is a writing problem. It's a research problem. AI helps with both, but the order matters.
What works: AI summarises a prospect's recent activity (LinkedIn post, company press release, last podcast appearance). You feed that summary into the email writing prompt.
What does not work: generic AI emails sent to 1000 addresses. Spam filters catch them, prospects ignore them.
The framework:
- Find 50-100 high-fit prospects manually or with Apollo / Clay
- For each, AI scrapes their public footprint into a one-paragraph brief
- Email template references that brief in the first sentence
- Send manually, not in bulk
Reply rates we've seen with this: 12-18%. Bulk AI spam: 0.3%.