For most professionals, email has turned into an inexorable tide — unrelenting, constantly requiring attention. In a 2025 ZeroBounce survey, 42% of respondents checked their inbox three to five times a day, and 35% spend up to five hours a day reading emails.
Even more astonishing, however, 79% of individuals say they check email because they get significant work messages, and 43% unsubscribe from lists merely because they’re overwhelmed by the volume.
Given the high incidence of inbox fatigue, Cristina Grau-Vilchez is banking on AI to come to the rescue. As the CEO of Twintual, an AI-driven communication assistant, she aims to empower individuals to take back their time by transforming the way they manage emails and messages across platforms.
“I was totally overwhelmed by this enormous message onslaught that I was getting. I couldn’t disregard certain messages from my company or my Harvard PI, but I also didn’t have the opportunity to respond to every message immediately,” she said during a Zoom call.
This personal frustration was the inspiration for Twintual, now crowdfunding on Kickstarter. The service proposes to simplify digital communication by using behavioral AI to compose email responses, summarize discussions and even reply to messages — with a clear indication in each case that AI, not a human, has created the content.
Reclaiming Productivity with AI
Grau-Vilchez views Twintual as a productivity tool, not merely an email organizer — but she says it has potential to cut down on cognitive stress as well.
“We think that we communicate nowadays in a not-healthy way, and it has to be improved,” she said.
Science is on her side; excessive management of email has been tied to stress, distraction and decreased workplace productivity.
Unlike other AI email assistants on the market today, Twintual is a cross-functional tool found on different messaging platforms like Gmail and Outlook, as well as Slack, LinkedIn and WhatsApp. It classifies messages by urgency and user action and auto-drafts responses that can be edited prior to sending.
“One of our beta users said to me, ‘I want AI to suggest email drafts, but I don’t want it to send them out without my permission,’ — and that’s what we’re building,” Grau-Vilchez noted.
Twintual is starting off with a B2B-driven strategy, starting with professionals who are experiencing inbox overwhelm.
“We’d like to start with businesses that can test the Pro and Custom plans. When we are financially stable, then we will offer it to normal users because, in the long run, anyone can make use of this,” she added.
Can AI cure Email Fatigue?
Although AI-powered email assistants are not new, Twintual hopes to stand out by prioritizing flexibility and privacy. Grau-Vilchez made a point to highlight that every user’s AI profile is stored individually in Twintual’s database to avoid leaking data and provide personalized responses.
“We don’t want AI to hallucinate and confuse responses among users. If Twintual doesn’t know about other accounts, it won’t be able to access them,” she said.
The startup already has partnerships with industry behemoths like Google and Inflection AI and has received extensive press coverage in Spain, she said. It’s also caught the eye of corporate beta testers eager to explore AI’s potential for automating digital workflows.
“We have three big companies lined up to start using Twintual early in 2025,” she said.
The Future of AI in Digital Communication
With the fast development of AI, Twintual joins a competitive field of automation tools battling for inbox supremacy. Yet Grau-Vilchez is confident that Twintual’s focus on behavioral AI, platform-agnostic compatibility and end-user control will differentiate it from the pack.
Ultimately, whether AI-driven email helpers like Twintual become mainstream or not will depend on their ability to balance efficiency and personalization. But if ZeroBounce’s survey findings are anything to go by, professionals are long overdue for tools that can help them cope with the endless influx of electronic messages.
For people buried beneath email, Twintual’s Kickstarter page is a tool that promises to dig them out and stay on top of future online communiques. And if Grau-Vilchez gets her way, that future may be slightly less daunting.
