Vendor onboarding usually starts with one clean request and then turns into a messy thread. Procurement asks for a W-9, security asks for a SOC 2 report, finance asks for remittance details, legal asks for an executed agreement, and the vendor replies with four attachments across three messages because different people own different parts of the process.
That is exactly the kind of workflow where a generic "AI email assistant" gets risky. You do not want a model improvising legal language, requesting bank details in the wrong channel, or forwarding a confidential report to the wrong internal alias. You want the agent to own the repetitive coordination while your application keeps the state machine, policy, audit log, and approvals.
The pattern I reach for is a dedicated Nylas Agent Account: vendors@yourcompany.com. It is a real mailbox the onboarding agent owns. It receives the vendor's replies, detects what is attached, updates your vendor record, sends safe reminders, and escalates missing or sensitive items to a human. The agent is not borrowing an employee's inbox, and it is not scraping a shared procurement mailbox. It has a grant, an email address, webhooks, threads, folders, and the same Messages API you would use for any other mailbox.
