Google manages your Gmail inbox using artificial intelligence

Google is announcing a new AI Inbox offering for Gmail that, instead of presenting your emails in a traditional list, uses AI to present personalized tasks and summaries of topics you might want to follow up on from your emails.

This has the potential to be a big shift in how you navigate your Gmail, especially if you have a lot to sort or if (like me) you already use your inbox as a to-do list. In a demo video, AI Inbox suggests tasks such as rescheduling a dentist appointment, responding to a coach, and paying for a sports tournament, and also outlines topics to follow, such as a team’s soccer season and a family gathering.

Google is initially rolling out AI Inbox to “trusted testers” in the US using browsers, and it will first be available to consumer Gmail accounts — you can’t use it with Workspace accounts yet. There’s also no way to determine whether you’ve completed a suggested item — something Google is working on, according to the company’s Gmail product vice president, Blake Barnes — which means Gmail won’t yet know if you, for example, call someone based on Gmail’s recommended action, rather than sending them an email.

Barnes also says there’s no limit to the number of tasks Gmail may suggest. While AI Inbox attempts to prioritize what’s important to you based on signals like who you email and what you respond to the quickest, too much can result in a still-overwhelming inbox but with a new design.

However, given how much our lives flow through our inboxes, if AI Inbox is somewhat successful at making timely recommendations and summarizing important emails, this feature could be very useful.

All consumer Gmail users also get Suggested responses with personalization, AI overview for topic summariesand Google Help me write — All features that Google previously included in paid plans — at no additional cost. Subscribers to Google One AI Pro ($19.99 per month) and Ultra ($249.99 per month) plans in the US will get a Grammarly-like proofreading feature, as well as an AI overview in search results, both available in browsers. (A Google example of the latter is “Who is the plumber who gave me a quote for a bathroom renovation last year?”)

If you don’t want to use Gmail’s AI features, you can turn them off (although this disables other intelligent features, like spell checking). Company He also says It does not use Gmail content to train its Gemini AI models.