Google is taking over your Gmail inbox with AI

Google is announcing a new AI Inbox view for Gmail that, instead of presenting your emails in a traditional list, uses AI to offer personalized to-dos and summaries of topics you might want to follow from your emails.

It’s a potentially huge shift in how you might navigate your Gmail, especially if you have a lot to sort through or if you (like me) already use your inbox as a to-do list. In a demo video, AI Inbox suggests tasks like rescheduling a dentist appointment, replying to a coach, and paying a sports tournament fee, and also summarizes topics to catch up on, like a team’s soccer season and a family gathering.

Google is initially rolling AI Inbox out to “trusted testers” in the US using browsers, and it will be available first for consumer Gmail accounts — you can’t use it with Workspace accounts yet. There’s also not yet a way to mark if you have completed one of the suggested items — it’s something Google is working on, according to the company’s VP of product for Gmail, Blake Barnes — meaning that Gmail won’t yet know if, for example, you call somebody based on Gmail’s recommended action, rather than emailing them.

Barnes also says there’s no limit to the number of to-dos Gmail might suggest. While AI Inbox tries to prioritize what’s important to you based on signals like who you email and what things you respond to the quickest, too many to-dos could just perpetuate inbox overwhelm but with a new design.

Still, given how much of our lives flows through our inboxes, if AI Inbox is even somewhat successful at making timely recommendations and summarizing important emails, the feature could be quite useful.

All consumer Gmail users are also getting suggested replies with personalization, AI overviews for thread summaries, and Google’s Help Me Write tool — all features Google has previously included with paid plans — at no extra cost. Subscribers to Google One AI Pro ($19.99 per month) and Ultra ($249.99 per month) plans in the US will be getting a Grammarly-like proofread feature, as well as AI overviews in search results, both available in browsers. (Google’s example for the latter is “Who was the plumber that gave me a quote for the bathroom renovation last year?”)

If you don’t want to use AI features in Gmail, you can turn them off (though that disables other smart features, like spell checking). The company also says that it doesn’t use Gmail content for training its Gemini AI models.