When there’s only one of everything, you can’t email like an ecommerce brand.

Elliot sits down with Vinit Ramnarayan, who has spent just over seven years in CRM at Sotheby’s. His route into email went through telecoms in India, DVD and Blu-ray licensing, and Havaianas in Madrid. While he was there he started helping the email team, taught himself the HTML and went freelance.

At an auction house, stock is finite and every item is one of a kind. So the email isn’t a weekly buy-buy-buy blast. It’s the timely alert: the artist you collect is coming up for auction, or the lot you liked closes in five minutes. And loyalty means looking after whole families, because the person you sell to today might consign that piece back to you years later.

Vinit explains how his growth marketing team wins over relationship managers who have guarded their clients for decades. They don’t fight for channel credit. They measure themselves against what the whole business needs: more bidders per lot, more consignments.

On AI, his team uses it to stop waiting on engineering. But he’s wary of vibe coding. If you don’t understand where your data comes from, you can’t trust what you’re sending.

In this episode:

• From telecoms in India to CRM at Sotheby’s
• Nobody’s painting any more Picassos, and what finite stock does to CRM
• Email as a timely alert, not a blast
• Loyalty across generations of collectors
• Measuring the team against company goals, not channel credit
• Using AI to stop waiting on engineering, and why vibe coding worries him
• Decades of offline data, and why plug-and-play AI makes him hesitant

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/

Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/

EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/

ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/

Why not hand every email to AI, from the first build to the final send? It would be faster. It would also give you twenty different versions of your brand, headlines that run past the character limit, and nobody accountable when something goes out wrong.

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey take on the "just AI everything" pitch that's all over LinkedIn. Elliot starts with a real test: he connected Claude to his Gmail and had it unsubscribe inboxes from everything they'd signed up to. It cleared weeks of work, but it still came back with a handful of failures per person to sort out by hand.

Joe explains why email design systems, the pre-approved building blocks that keep a brand consistent, are turning into the guardrails AI needs. A prompt or a skill can describe your brand, but a design system with validation rules can enforce it. That matters when an LLM can't reliably count to forty characters. The question now isn't whether AI can build an email. It's how you keep 200 agents building for your brand without drifting off it.

Will brings in what CRM teams are telling us: junior builds that look fine and then break in the inbox, taped-together workflows that leave every email slightly off-brand, and how much nuance you'd have to teach a model before it gets things right.

They also ask whether every email will end up looking the same, why AI should raise standards rather than cut corners, and which jobs nobody should be doing by hand anymore, like checking every link in 16 languages or copying and pasting all day.

In this episode:

• Letting Claude loose on an inbox
• Why not just AI everything?
• Email design systems as guardrails for AI
• Skills vs validation rules: describing your brand vs enforcing it
• Keeping 200 AI agents on-brand
• Accountability: "the agents did it" isn't an answer
• AI doesn't replace humans, it shows where they're invaluable
• Ask AI for the process, not just the output

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Klaviyo or any other ESP, and you keep hearing that AI can do the lot, this episode gives you a better question to ask: where does your team add value, and what does AI need from you to stay on brand?

What would you do with the time AI gives back? Tell us in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/

Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/

EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/

ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/

AI will tell you it's right whether it is or not. So how does an email team work out what to hand over, what to check, and what to keep?

In this episode of Email Talk, Elliot Ross, Joe Cottam and Will Harvey look at trust in AI for email marketing and CRM teams. Elliot has just come back from Ogilvy's Nudgestock, where this year's theme was trust in the digital age. That sets up the conversation: how you learn when to trust AI output and when not to, and why this change is harder to manage than mobile or GDPR ever were.

Will talks about the themes coming out of CRM teams at the moment, Joe explains why AI is most useful in work you already know well. They also look at why AI can speed up an email build and still leave you with the same QA time at the end.

In this episode:

• The pattern this week: teams building their own AI tools vs teams doing nothing at all
• Nudgestock, Rory Sutherland and trust in the digital age
• How do you learn to trust AI, and when to stop?
• "AI doesn't replace humans, it surfaces what's irreplaceable"
• Using AI where you're the expert vs where you're not
• If you tried ChatGPT two years ago and gave up, try again
• Skills, context and codifying what "on brand" means
• Does AI save time if you still have to check its homework?
• The human sandwich: human, AI, human

If you run email or CRM at a brand, in Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe or any other ESP, and you're working out how far to trust AI with your campaigns, this episode gives you a practical way to test it: try it first on the work you know best.

Tell us about the best time AI lied to you. Drop it in the comments.

Subscribe for new episodes on email marketing, AI, CRM and email design systems.

Elliot Ross — Founder, ActionRocket; co-founder, Taxi for Email
https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamelliot/

Joe Cottam — Co-founder, EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-cottam-80580352/

Will Harvey — EmailShepherd
https://www.linkedin.com/in/willharvey/

EmailShepherd — the agentic email creation platform to do what used to take days in just minutes:
https://www.emailshepherd.com/

ActionRocket — the independent CRM creative agency:
https://www.actionrocket.co/