Google Just Announced Major AI Changes to Gmail. Here’s What’s Coming

Gmail is getting a major AI upgrade. Get ready for the AI Inbox, which aims to be like a ‘chief of staff in your life.’ Google has announced three new AI-powered features coming to the massively popular email platform. The company has also made a few AI features that were previously exclusive to paid subscribers available for free. The new features provide users with editorial guidance while composing emails, enhance Gmail’s search capabilities, and proactively surface insights through a new experience that the company calls an “AI Inbox.” In an interview, Gmail product lead Blake Barnes tells Inc. that all of the new AI features are designed to be additive, without fundamentally altering the simplicity that has allowed Gmail to thrive for over 20 years. To avoid any kind of disruption, Barnes says, “we made very intentional and specific decisions to extend from features that already exist in a very natural way, but using modern day technology.” Take Proofreader, one of the new AI features announced today, as an example. According to Barnes, Proofreader is essentially an upgraded version of common spellcheck tools. But unlike those tools, which typically only highlight misspellings and grammatical errors, Proofreader will suggest more editorially-minded changes, calling out instances of passive voice, suggesting to break up long sentences, and underlining repetitive statements. Gmail’s search function is also getting an upgrade. Instead of just typing keywords into the search bar, users can now enter full sentences, and in response, the platform will generate an AI Overview, just like the ones that appear at the top of most Google searches nowadays. These overviews are entirely based on information within your Gmail. According to Barnes, “we’ll scour every email in your inbox, and we’ll give you the answer to your questions right at the top.” Both Proofreader and AI Overviews in Gmail search will be available to paid subscribers of Google’s AI Pro and AI Ultra plans. Unlike those two features, which are evolutions of previously established tools, the AI Inbox is a brand-new experience. Instead of displaying your most recent emails, Barnes says, AI Inbox acts as a kind of “personal, proactive inbox assistant,” periodically scanning your inbox to identify priority emails and then grouping them into either suggested to-dos or topics to catch up on. In an example shown to Inc., an email from a dental office requesting an appointment reschedule was flagged as a to-do, and included information about alternative times in the summary. “It’s almost like you have a chief of staff in your life,” says Barnes, acknowledging the feature’s potential appeal for enterprise customers, where it could help employees to stay on top of their work. While AI Inbox is currently only available to early-access testers, Barnes says it will soon come to Google Workspace paid accounts. Barnes also announced that a few AI-powered Gmail features that previously required a subscription to use are now free for everyone. These features include Smart Reply, a tool that suggests short responses to emails; Help Me Write, a tool that generates and edits text through prompts; and AI Summaries, a feature that condenses and summarizes full email threads. Gmail was able to fully deploy these features without sacrificing quality, according to Barnes, because of efficiency gains achieved by Google teams at the software and hardware level. “They’re not getting a watered-down version,” says Barnes. “They’re getting the best we have.” BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY