Surveys what it actually takes to ship the AI inbox-triage feature
gated on Google Workspace integration. Walks through three deployment
models with their real costs:
- Model A (Marketplace OAuth app): 4-6 months calendar, $15k-$75k for
the required CASA security assessment, recurring re-verification
- Model B (per-customer Internal OAuth app): ~5 weeks engineering, $0
Google-side, scoped to one workspace per customer
- Model C (forward-to-CRM mailbox): ~1 week, receive-only, no reply
drafts possible
Recommends Model B for the current customer profile, with B → A
promotion only if 3+ customers ask unprompted.
Documents what's already scaffolded (email_accounts/threads/messages
tables, syncInbox stub, BullMQ email queue, ai_usage_ledger, per-port
aiEnabled flag, withRateLimit('ai')) vs what's new (OAuth flow, Pub/
Sub push receiver, gws_user_tokens + email_triage tables, /inbox UI).
End-to-end flow, schema additions, AI cost interaction with the
Phase 3b token budgets, 5-phase build plan (G1-G5), and 5 open
decisions to resolve before scheduling the build. Explicitly out of
scope: M365, sentiment analysis, smart-drafts, cross-staff triage
queue.
No code changes — this is a design doc to drive a go/no-go decision.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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