This week, Google announced a novel AI inbox view in Gmail that replaces the classic email list with an AI-generated list of tasks and topics that can be tracked based on the contents of your inbox. It’s not widely available yet, but I have access to it, and in the few hours I’ve spent working on it, I can see how Inbox AI can be a helpful, even transformative way to manage your inbox. But right now it won’t change the way I manage email, and I’m not sure it ever will.
Before I dive in, I should point out a few things up front. AI Inbox is a very early product and is currently only available to “trusted testers”. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to take advantage of it yet, and what it looks like now may not be indicative of what it will look like once it’s widely released. This feature currently only works with consumer Gmail accounts, not Workspace accounts, so I could only see how it handled my personal inbox and not my much busier work inbox.
However, as someone who already has a very narrow approach to email, I was curious if Inbox AI could improve my system, which has almost no inboxes.
As I wrote these words on Friday, there were six emails in my personal inbox:
- Snoozed email from Chris Plante Mail games
- Email from Flipboard’s Surf app
- An email from my mortgage lender asking to see my annual escrow summary
- AND last Platformer bulletin I sent it from my work email to my private email
- An offer from a friend sent to my personal email, promising to post something soon Edge
- And a newsletter from a gaming website Aftermath.
That’s a huge number for me; instead of deciding as quickly as possible whether I need to do something with emails, I let them sit and see how Inbox’s AI handles them.
But if I click on the novel AI Inbox icon in the sidebar above the classic inbox, after a few seconds of loading, my inbox will look completely different.
Screenshot: Jay Peters/The Verge
Screenshot: Jay Peters/The Verge
With AI Inbox, my inbox becomes an AI-generated page of compact summaries to read. At the top are suggested tasks to complete, along with links to the emails they relate to if I want to learn more or respond. Below the list of tasks there are topics to catch up on, with links to appropriate e-mails. Perhaps most importantly, AI Inbox downloaded two things I had archived that aren’t in my main inbox: conversations between my wife and I about tax preparation and potty training our toddler.
It’s a bit like Google Search’s AI mode, but for your Gmail. As with 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 my inbox neat, tidy and compact; as quickly as possible, I decide what to do with the email (read, reply, remind about it, etc.) and then archive it.
In turn, AI Inbox fills my screen with unnecessary information. I have to scroll down on my 13-inch MacBook Air to see the full AI inbox summary, but in my regular inbox I only have six email threads to look at. The tool also guesses what is critical to me at a given moment; it doesn’t seem to matter that I only keep things in my inbox that I need to figure out what to do with. Yes, although my wife and I need to send our tax liability letter to our accountant, we don’t have to do it today and we already have a plan for when we need to. Scheduling potty training is also not something I have to catch up on since my wife and I actively talk about it in real life.
That said, if you’re not as ruthless as me when it comes to organizing your email and tasks, I can see how these AI Inbox tips and suggestions could be very useful. In an interview with EdgeBlake Barnes, Google’s vice president of Gmail, says the company believes people are treating AI Inbox as a tool to complement their core inbox flow, and I think that’s how we look at it for now.
Once again, AI Inbox is a very early product that is not widely available, and Google seems to have plenty of ideas on how to improve it. Barnes says the company is working on a way to mark one of the suggested items as completed. He says Google wants to add a quick reply button to Inbox’s AI suggestions and potentially even suggest ready-made replies to you. The company wants to integrate AI Inbox with Google Calendar so that suggested drafts can have suggested times preloaded if someone invites you to a meeting. He even described how users could simply tell the Inbox AI to watch out for emails from a specific person.
If Google’s bigger AI Inbox ideas come to fruition, you could see how Gmail could transform from a constant barrage of stuff into a shooting spree to an AI-enhanced personal assistant. Depending on how often you exploit email, this can be quite useful. However, if this is what Inbox AI turns into, you’re putting a lot of trust in Google’s AI to handle the load, rather than coming up with your own system to manage your inbox exactly the way you want it.
Just as Google has rapidly expanded its AI mode, I expect it will do the same with AI Inbox and perhaps become a tool in my arsenal in the future. I’ve also only been playing with AI Inbox since Thursday evening, 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 great for me and I think it will continue to do so for many years to come.