An AI Inbox is Coming For Gmail

The next evolution of Gmail could be an AI Inbox. I’m sure we all saw this one coming, but Google has started rolling it out to “trusted testers” and showed off a bit of a preview today.

The idea behind an AI Inbox is that your inbox could be filled with unimportant garbage, so AI could help to filter out a bunch of clutter and attempt to show you the most important stuff. Of course, you’d have to fully trust AI for that to be a thing to take a chance on, but that’s probably why Google is only rolling this out in a super limited capacity at this time.

In their description for the AI Inbox, which would live above your current Inbox tab in the sidebar, Google says the following:

AI Inbox is like having a personalized briefing, highlighting to-dos and catching you up on what matters. It helps you prioritize, identifying your VIPs based on signals like people you email frequently, those in your contacts list and relationships it can infer from message content. Crucially, this analysis happens securely with the privacy protections you expect from Google, keeping your data under your control. This lets high-stakes items — like a bill due tomorrow or a dentist reminder — rise to the top.

While that sounds fine, I guess, the image below shows what this AI Inbox will look like in this first release. You can see suggested to-dos and other topics you may need to catch-up on. Those topics could be anything from your kids’ sports schedules to an upcoming family gathering or upcoming events and updates on other ongoing items. Each of the topics ends with shortcuts to related emails, some of which could have multiple references.

This just doesn’t really seem like an inbox and is more of a to-do space within Gmail. The idea is kind of nice, especially for someone who needs help being organized, but looking at this “Beta” version, I just don’t know how this would help you manage email at all. In the end, Gmail is for email not just for AI to shrink items down that it deems to be important into an organizer. Or maybe it does? Maybe we just need a name change to “AI Organizer?”

You tell me.