Google’s AI Inbox could be a glimpse of Gmail’s future

This week, Google announced a new AI Inbox view for Gmail, which replaces the traditional list of emails with an AI-generated list of tasks and topics to track based on what’s in your inbox. It’s not widely available yet, but I have access, and in the few hours I’ve spent messing around with it, I can see how AI Inbox could be a helpful or game-changing way to manage your inbox. But right now, it’s not going to change the way I manage email, and I’m not sure it ever will.

Before I delve deeper, let me note a few things first. AI Inbox is a very early product that is currently only available to “trusted testers”. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to use it for yourself right now, and what it is now may not represent what it will be like when it launches more widely. The feature currently only works with consumer Gmail accounts, not workspace accounts, so I’ve only been able to see how it handles my personal inbox, not my more busy work inbox.

But as someone who already runs a very tight ship when it comes to my email, I was curious if AI Inbox could make my nearly inbox-zero system even better.

As I write this on Friday, there are six emails in my personal inbox:

This, to me, is a high number; Instead of deciding as quickly as possible whether I needed to do something with the emails, I let them sit to see how the AI ​​inbox would handle them.

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

With AI Inbox, my inbox becomes an AI-generated page of short summaries to read. There are working tips at the top if I want to find out more information or provide feedback, as well as links to emails I’d like to hear from. Under tasks, there are also topics to capture, along with links to relevant emails. Perhaps most notably, the AI ​​Inbox pulled up two things that I’ve archived and aren’t in my main inbox: conversations between my wife and I about tax preparation and potty training for our child.

It’s just like Google Search’s AI mode, but for your Gmail. And similar to AI mode, I don’t think AI inbox is for me.

I’ve been actively using email since I was a teenager, so at this point I’ve spent decades perfecting my personal email management system. My philosophy is to keep your inbox neat and concise; As soon as I can, I decide what I want to do with the email (read, reply, create a reminder against it, etc.) and then archive it.

On the other hand, AI inbox fills my screen with unnecessary information. I have to scroll down the screen of my 13-inch MacBook Air to see my full AI inbox summary, but in my normal inbox, I only have six email threads to view. The tool is also incorrectly guessing what is relevant to me right now; It doesn’t make sense that I only keep things in my inbox that I have to figure out what to do with. Yes, while my wife and I have to submit tax engagement forms to our accountant, we don’t need to do that today, and we already have a plan for when we need to. The potty training plan also isn’t something I need to hold onto because my wife and I are actively talking about it in real life.

That said, if you’re not as ruthless as I am when it comes to keeping your email organized and your tasks in order, I can see how these hints and tips from the AI ​​Inbox could be very useful. in an interview with The VergeBlake Barnes, Google’s product vice president for Gmail, says the company is seeing people consider AI Inbox as a complementary tool to their main 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 that isn’t widely available, and Google seems to have a lot of ideas about how to improve it. Barnes says the company is working on a way to mark one of the suggested items as complete. He says Google wants to add a quick-reply button to AI inbox suggestions and potentially even suggest drafted replies for you. The company wants to integrate AI Inbox with Google Calendar so that if someone invites you to a meeting the suggested time can be preloaded into the suggested draft. He also explained how users can eventually ask the AI ​​Inbox to keep an eye on a certain person’s emails.

If Google’s big ideas for an AI inbox come to fruition, you can see how Gmail could transform from a constant flood of things into an AI-supercharged personal assistant. Depending on how much of your life you run through email, this could be quite useful. But if it turns into AI inbox, you’re relying heavily on Google’s AI to be able to handle that workload rather than figuring out your system to manage your inbox exactly the way you want.

Just as Google quickly expanded AI modes, I hope it does the same with AI Inbox, and perhaps it will become a tool in my arsenal in the future. I’ve also only been messing around with AI Inbox since Thursday night, so my opinion may change the longer I have it. But for now, I suspect I won’t be using AI Inbox much. I may be stuck in my ways, but my system works very well for me, and I think it will hold up for years to come.