TL;DR: I connected Grok Bot (a desktop AI agent) to Gmail and asked for a daily cold email campaign of 10 emails. It wanted a paid lead tool, so I pointed it at a free Google Maps method I'd built before. The first emails came out messy, then over-designed, and only the third try was a plain email I'd send. The automation ended up running, but I have no opens, replies or meetings from this run. It's a setup log, not a results case study.
Why I ran this
Cold email is one of the most practical jobs an AI agent could take off my plate: find businesses, write to them, send every day. I wanted to see how far plain-language instructions get me, including the parts that usually need paid tools.
The setup
- Grok Bot, a new bot created just for this (rename, upload a profile picture, done)
- Gmail plugin, connected to my Axagen account
- My website as the source for the offer
- A lead finder I built in an earlier video, which uses the Google Maps / Google Places API
- Local computer access, so the agent could open that project folder itself
Connecting Gmail was quick: plugins, Gmail, add account, authorize, pick the account in the browser, allow access. One nice detail: once an account is connected in plugins, every bot I run can use it, so I don't reconnect per bot.
Step 1: Inbox warm-up
Before cold email I tested simple inbox work.
- "Read the inbox of my Axagen email. Is there anything new today? While you're at it, delete about five spam emails." It reported nothing new since midnight.
- "Read those collaboration pitches, talk to those people and ask them more. Don't agree on anything. If it's trash, decline. If it's interesting, tell me."
- "Create a routine to check every day for new emails, delete complete junk, and tell me if something is interesting. Once a day is enough."
Any chat AI can do the first two. The routine is what matters: a saved instruction that runs on a schedule by itself.
Step 2: Brief the cold campaign
My brief, roughly as I said it:
Set me up a cold email campaign to run daily, 10 cold emails. It's the AI automation niche, and I want to offer something similar to what's on my website. Before you send anything, write me an example here. Target people in the United States: managers, social media, at not very big companies. Your task is to find those leads yourself. How are you going to do it?
It read my site and came back with a very simple example email based on it. Then it explained its plan: search the internet for 10 real businesses every day.
Step 3: Say no to the paid tool
Its plan for finding leads was to add an Apollo connector. Reasonable idea, but Apollo costs money, so I said no.
Instead I gave it the folder location of the lead finder from my earlier video and told it: open this folder, learn this method, use the same Google Maps API, this is the free method. I also asked it to add a second routine to find emails and send cold emails daily, every day, not only weekdays, and to switch the inbox routine to every day too.
First hiccup: it couldn't find the folder. That was on me. I had copied it over from another computer. Because the agent has local access to this machine, it went and found it on its own. After reading the project it understood it should use Google Places for the leads.
Step 4: First live send
"Find me 10 actual leads and send them out right now."
- On the first run it asked permission to run some tasks. I clicked allow once. That's part of the one-time setup cost; later runs are meant to go automatically.
- Then it stopped with "model provider is overloaded": under heavy load, usually temporary, try again shortly. I'd never seen that before.
- When it did go through, I checked Gmail's sent folder. The emails it had sent were messy. Ugly, honestly.
Step 5: Fixing the email, twice
I screenshotted the bad email, gave it back, and said: send yourself a test email and keep fixing it until it looks good. You have my email access, so read it yourself.
It fixed it, but in the wrong direction. It made a "beautiful" email with buttons, like a newsletter. Not what I meant. So I spelled it out: a simple email, no buttons, nothing fancy, just a regular email.
The next test came back as a plain, normal-looking email. That's the one that stuck. When I asked how it would all run and whether it was sending now, it said everything was set up.
The funny part: I'd set up this exact same kind of program before with another email account, and that time it did everything on the first try. This time it got stuck, threw errors and had its own ideas about what a cold email should look like.
Results
| What I tested | What happened |
|---|---|
| Connect Gmail | Quick, and shared across all my bots |
| Read inbox + delete spam | Worked; nothing new since midnight |
| Handle collaboration pitches | Told it to ask questions and agree to nothing |
| Daily inbox cleanup routine | Created, then switched to every day |
| Find leads | Suggested paid Apollo; I swapped in my free Google Maps / Places method |
| Learn from a local project folder | Missed it first (my copy mistake), then found it itself |
| First live send of 10 | Needed "allow once", hit a provider overload error |
| Email quality | Messy, then over-designed with buttons, then plain on the third try |
| Final state | Daily lead finding and sending set up |
| Opens, replies, meetings | Not measured in this run |
What failed
- The paid default. Left alone, the agent reached for a paid lead tool.
- Folder handoff. My fault; a wrong path cost a round trip.
- Provider overload. Out of my control.
- Email quality. Two bad versions went out before a good one. "Make it beautiful" was a bad instruction from me; "plain regular email" was the right one.
- Same setup, different behaviour. The earlier run worked first try; this one didn't.
- No outcome numbers. The video ends when the system is running. Whether this gets replies depends on the offer and the email, and I didn't measure that here.
What I'd do differently
- Lock a plain-text template with test emails to myself before going live.
- Put "free tools only" in the very first brief.
- Keep lead finding and sending as separate steps so I can check the leads before anything goes out.
- Track sends, replies and real conversations for a week before calling it a win.
Always follow the email marketing, privacy and anti-spam rules where you and your recipients are. Written up from my video with AI help; the test and the opinions are mine.
Full run on video (my channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy8g3_k2Ios
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