Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava Says AI-Written Emails Are Draining Real Conversation From Music Teams

Kakul Srivastava, chief executive of the sample marketplace Splice, is pushing back on a habit that has quietly spread through the music industry: letting AI draft the emails people send each other. Her argument, aired in a conversation with The Verge, is that the tool meant to save time is stripping out the friction that makes collaboration work — the hesitation, the tangent, the half-formed idea that turns into a song.

Splice sits at the center of how modern tracks get built. Producers browse its library for one-shots and melodic loops, and those files have landed in records with serious chart reach, including Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" and Lisa's "Money." The company's customers are not sending routine corporate notes; they are trading stems, clearing samples and pitching ideas across time zones, often with people they have never met in person.

Srivastava's résumé gives the critique some weight beyond a CEO's opinion. Before taking the top job at Splice, she held executive roles at companies operating at the intersection of creative tools and large user bases, and she has spent years watching how software changes the way artists and technicians talk to one another. Her concern is less about any single AI product than about the defaults that creep in when writing gets automated.

The specific worry is what gets lost. An AI-drafted message tends to arrive polished and complete, with the ask stated plainly and the ambiguity sanded off. In creative fields, that polish can read as a closed door — there is no obvious place to push back, no loose thread to pull. The reply becomes a yes or no rather than the start of something.

It is a small claim that lands inside a much larger fight. Music has spent the past two years arguing about generative tools that produce vocals, master recordings and entire compositions, with lawsuits and licensing deals moving through court. Srivastava is pointing at a quieter layer of the stack: the everyday correspondence where deals and creative partnerships actually get negotiated.

There is no clean fix on offer, and that is part of the point. Splice could build guardrails into its own products, but email sits outside any single company's control, and most professionals are not going to abandon a tool that saves them an hour a day. The open question is whether the industry treats AI-written correspondence as a neutral convenience or as something that changes the quality of the work it touches.