Despite texts, DMs, and Slack, tech companies are racing to own your inbox. Why? It’s the key to unlocking personalized AI. The founder of Slack once deemed email “the cockroach of the internet.” He wasn’t the first to lament the extreme survivability of our inbox. From text messages to social media to office messaging platforms, all sorts of communication technologies have teased the promise of killing email by connecting us to others in faster, richer ways.