The AI Email Campaign Builder is an assistant that sits beside the email editor. You describe the email you need and it drafts the whole thing: subject line, preheader, layout, and copy. You can keep working in the drag-and-drop editor at the same time, because both are editing the same campaign.
Before you start
The assistant appears only when AI features are enabled for your organization, under Settings, then General, then Agentic AI, and the email campaign builder is turned on for your account. It is currently in early access. If you do not see it and would like it enabled, contact support.
Opening the assistant
Open an email campaign in the email builder. In the toolbar you will see an Assistant button, labelled with its keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+J. Click it, or press Ctrl+J, or Cmd+J on a Mac.
One thing to watch: open a saved template rather than a campaign and you will get the older email editor, which has no Assistant button. If the toolbar looks different from the picture above and there is no Assistant, check whether you have opened a template instead of a campaign.
Working in both places at once
The assistant is not a separate mode or a second copy of your email. It opens as a panel next to the same canvas, and both surfaces edit the same campaign.
In practice that means:
When the assistant makes a change, the canvas updates right away and the blocks it touched flash so you can see what moved.
When you edit by hand, your work is saved before the assistant takes its next turn, so it is always working from what is actually on the page.
You can close the panel, edit by hand, reopen it, and carry on. Nothing is lost and there is no second draft to reconcile.
What the assistant can do
Ask in plain language. It can:
Draft a whole campaign from a goal, an audience, and a tone.
Write and rewrite copy, including subject lines, preheaders, and the copy inside content blocks.
Build and rearrange layout: add, update, move, duplicate, and remove sections and blocks.
Insert blocks: text, buttons, images, image with caption, dividers, headers and footers, social sharing, view in browser, multi-column layouts, live polls, and events.
Restyle blocks and sections, including colors, backgrounds, and spacing, to match your brand.
Work with images: search your media library, or save an image you attach in chat into the library.
Pull in project content: read a linked project's description, polls, events, and documents.
Check the campaign against email best practices and run a pre-send validation pass.
Undo any change you do not like.
Two block types are worth calling out, because a general-purpose AI writing tool cannot produce them:
A poll block embeds one of your existing live polls in the email so recipients can answer from their inbox. It references a real poll from your account rather than inventing one.
An event block links a real event with RSVP and add-to-calendar built in, using the actual event date.
Starting a campaign from scratch
When you start a new campaign with the assistant, it asks for a few things up front:
Goal. What the email is for, in a sentence.
Audience. All subscribers, project followers, residents, stakeholders, or internal.
Tone. Friendly, professional, urgent, or celebratory.
A project to link. Optional, but see the next section for why it matters.
Planning documents. Optional. Attach a PDF, Word document, text file, or CSV and the assistant will read it for context.
It then drafts the full email and streams it onto the canvas as it goes. It is opinionated: it decides the structure rather than asking you to design it. Treat the first pass as a starting point and refine by asking for changes.
Matching a flyer or existing design
You can attach an image in the chat and ask the assistant to match it. This works well for picking up the colors and general style of a flyer or printed notice you have already produced.
The limits: up to three images per message, four megabytes each, and standard raster formats only, meaning PNG, JPEG, GIF, and WebP. SVG files are not accepted. When the assistant saves an attached image into your library it has to supply alt text, and that cannot be skipped.
Bringing your project content into an email
This is the biggest time-saver in the tool, and the reason to link a project.
When a campaign is linked to a project, the assistant reads that project directly and writes from real content instead of guessing. It can pull:
The project name and description
Your polls, with their actual questions
Your events, with real dates, for use in an event or RSVP block
Text content and FAQs from the project page
Documents attached to the project, which it can open and read
So you can ask for "an invitation to the Downtown Plan open house with the RSVP included" and get the real event, the real date, and the real project description rather than placeholder text.
Two things to know. The assistant only ever sees projects belonging to your own organization. And it reads a generous but finite amount, roughly the first 25 items of each kind and about 20,000 characters of any single document. For a long plan, point it at the section you care about rather than expecting it to absorb the whole file.
The pre-send check
Ask the assistant to check the campaign and it runs a fixed set of rules. This part is consistent rule checking, not the model's opinion. It looks for:
A missing subject line
A missing preheader
A missing footer, which is what carries the unsubscribe link required for bulk email
Buttons with no link attached
Images with no alt text
An email made entirely of images, with no real text
Findings appear as a checklist in the chat panel. Each finding tied to a specific block has a Show button that flashes that block on the canvas so you can find it immediately.
These are advisories and do not block sending. Treat the footer and alt text findings as the important ones: the first is a legal requirement for bulk email, and the second is an accessibility requirement.
The toolbar also has its own A11y Check button, which is separate from the assistant and checks the campaign directly.
Sending
The assistant cannot send email, and that is deliberate. It says so itself when you open it: it builds and edits the draft, and sending stays with you. The panel repeats the same note above the message box.
When the campaign is ready, use Preview & Send in the email builder as you normally would, and send a test to yourself first. The send path is unchanged from campaigns you build by hand.
Getting good results
Give it a goal, an audience, a tone, and a linked project. All four together produce a noticeably better first draft than a bare instruction.
Be specific about the outcome. "Drive RSVPs to the March 4 open house from people following the corridor study" beats "write an email about the project."
Ask for changes conversationally. "Make the intro two sentences shorter and move the RSVP button above the map" works.
Expect big requests to take a few turns. Ask it to restyle everything at once and it will work through a batch, then ask whether to continue.
Check the facts before you send. It grounds copy in your real project content, but you are the one sending it. Read the dates, times, and links.
Current limits
It cannot add or edit translation blocks or digest headers. Add those by hand in the editor.
It cannot choose your recipient list or schedule the send.
There is an hourly cap on assistant requests per organization, so a long session may pause.
Very large single requests can time out. If a response stalls, ask again in smaller pieces.
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