Google’s AI-powered inbox could be a glimpse into the future of Gmail

Google announced this week New AI inbox view for Gmail that replaces the traditional list of emails with an AI-generated list of tasks and topics for you to track based on what’s in your inbox. It’s not widely available yet, but I have access to it, and in the few hours I’ve spent tinkering with it, I can see how AI Inbox could be a useful or even transformative way to manage your inbox. But right now, this won’t change the way I manage my email, and I’m not sure it ever will.

Before I dive into it, I should point out a few things upfront. AI Inbox is a very early product and is currently only available to “trusted testers”. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to use this for yourself yet, and what it looks like now may not represent what it will be like when it’s widely released. This feature currently only works with consumer Gmail accounts, not Workspace accounts, so I could only see how it would work with my personal inbox, not my busier work inbox.

But as someone who already runs a pretty tight ship when it comes to my email, I was curious if Inbox’s AI could improve my inbox system.

When I wrote this on Friday, there were six emails sitting in my personal inbox:

This to me is a big number; Instead of deciding as quickly as possible if I needed to do something with emails, I let them sit and see how AI Inbox would handle it.

But if I click on the new AI Inbox icon in the sidebar above my traditional inbox, after a few seconds of loading, my inbox looks completely different.

With AI Inbox, my inbox instead becomes an AI-generated page with short summaries of reading. There are suggested tasks at the top, with links to emails that relate to them if I want to dig further or respond. Under Tasks, there are topics you can follow, as well as links to related emails. Perhaps most notably, AI Inbox pulled up two things I had archived and weren’t in my main inbox: conversations between my wife and me about preparing taxes and potty training our toddler.

It’s all like this AI mode for Google searchbut for your Gmail. Similar to AI mode, I don’t think AI Inbox is for me.

I’ve been an active user of email since I was a teenager, so I’ve spent decades honing my personal email management system. My philosophy is to keep my inbox neat, tidy, and compact; As soon as possible, I decide what to do with the email (read, reply, file a reminder, etc.) and then archive it.

On the other hand, AI Inbox fills my screen with unnecessary information. I have to swipe down on my 13-inch MacBook Air’s screen to see my entire inbox summary, but in my regular inbox, I only have six email threads to look at. The tool is also guessing, incorrectly, about me now; It doesn’t seem to take into account that I only keep things in my inbox that I need to know what to do with. Yes, while my wife and I have to submit a tax share letter to our accountant, we don’t need to do that today, and we already have a plan for when we need to. Also, potty training planning is not something I need to catch up on because my wife and I actively talk about it in real life.

However, if you’re not as stringent as me about keeping your email organized and your tasks organized, I can see how these alerts and suggestions from AI Inbox could be very useful. In an interview with EdgeBlake Barnes, VP of Gmail product at Google, says the company sees people approaching AI Inbox as a complementary tool to their primary inbox flow, and I think that’s the right way to look at it right now.

I should also reiterate that AI Inbox is a very early product and not widely available, and Google seems to have a lot of ideas on how to improve it. Barnes says the company is working on a way to mark a suggested item as complete. He says Google wants to add a quick reply button to AI Inbox suggestions and perhaps suggest written responses to you. The company wants to integrate AI Inbox with Google Calendar so that suggested drafts of suggested times can be pre-loaded if someone invites you to a meeting. He even described how users could eventually tell AI Inbox to search for emails from a specific person.

If Google’s bigger ideas for AI Inbox come true, you can see how Gmail could change from a constant deluge of crossfire stuff to a supercharged AI personal assistant. Depending on how much of your life you run through your email, this can be very useful. But if this is what AI Inbox turns into, then you’re putting a lot of trust in Google’s AI to be able to handle that workload rather than figuring out your own system to manage your inbox exactly the way you want.

Just as Google has rapidly expanded its AI mode, I expect it to do the same with AI Inbox, and perhaps it will become a tool in my arsenal in the future. I’ve also been messing around with AI Inbox since just Thursday night, so my opinion could change the longer I have it. But for now, I think I won’t be using AI Inbox much. Maybe I’m stuck in my ways, but my system works great for me, and I think it will hold up for years to come.