Asger Risom
The new AI Inbox doesn’t just surface emails. It interprets them.
For most of its existence, Gmail has functioned as a passive tool: a list of messages waiting for you to decide what matters, what can wait, and what can be ignored. Google’s latest update quietly flips that relationship on its head.
The company is rolling out a new AI-powered Inbox view that replaces the familiar chronological email list with something far more opinionated — a dynamically generated feed of summaries, suggested actions, and priorities decided by Google’s AI. Instead of showing you what arrived, Gmail now tells you what you should do.
From inbox to instruction list
The new AI Inbox doesn’t just surface emails. It interprets them.
In demo footage shared by Google, the interface highlights suggested actions such as rescheduling appointments, replying to specific people, or paying outstanding fees. It also groups emails into summarized topics — like an ongoing sports season or a family event — and presents them as things you might want to “catch up on,” rather than messages you explicitly asked to see.
In effect, Gmail is being repositioned as a task manager and personal assistant layered on top of your communications history. What used to be implicit — deciding what matters — is now automated.
Who gets it first, and who doesn’t
For now, AI Inbox is limited to “trusted testers” in the US using Gmail in a web browser, and it’s only available for consumer accounts. Workspace users are excluded, at least initially.
There are also some notable gaps. You can’t yet mark suggested tasks as completed, meaning Gmail has no way of knowing whether you acted on a recommendation outside the app — like making a phone call or paying a bill elsewhere. According to Google’s VP of Product for Gmail, Blake Barnes, that functionality is coming.
There’s also no stated cap on how many AI-generated to-dos Gmail can surface. While the system prioritizes actions based on who you interact with most and what you typically respond to quickly, the risk is obvious: inbox overwhelm, just repackaged with a cleaner interface.
Convenience vs. control
Google frames the shift as helpful — a way to reduce cognitive load as more of daily life flows through email. And for users already treating their inbox as a de facto to-do list, the approach may genuinely save time.
But it also raises a more fundamental question: who decides what your attention is for?
When AI mediates your inbox, it doesn’t just summarize information — it shapes behavior. Choosing what to surface, what to collapse into summaries, and what to deprioritize is a form of soft power, even if it’s optimized for convenience rather than persuasion.
AI everywhere, whether you want it or not
The AI Inbox is part of a broader push. All consumer Gmail users are also getting AI-generated reply suggestions with personalization, thread summaries, and Google’s Help Me Write tool at no extra cost — features that were previously tied to paid plans.
Subscribers to Google One AI Pro and Ultra plans in the US will get even more: a Grammarly-style proofreading tool and AI-powered search over personal data, allowing queries like finding who quoted you for a home renovation last year.
Google says Gmail content is not used to train its Gemini models, and AI features can be disabled — though doing so also turns off other “smart” functionality like spell check.
The quiet redefinition of email
What Google is doing with Gmail isn’t just adding AI features. It’s redefining what an inbox is supposed to be.
Email, once a neutral archive of communication, is becoming an interface where intent is inferred, priorities are assigned, and actions are nudged — sometimes before you’ve even opened a message.
Whether that feels like liberation or loss of agency will depend on how much control users ultimately retain. But one thing is already clear: Gmail is no longer just showing you your inbox.
It’s running it.
However, 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).
Sources: Google
