Gmail's First Lunge Towards Stabbing Email to Death with AI

Do you like email?

It is, of course, a rhetorical question as no one likes email.¹ It's a fact we're reminded of each and every new year after the holidays are over when you open your email service and your face is met with a fist in the form of your inbox. And while you might think that Google likes email because they run the most popular email service in Gmail, with 3 billion plus users, there's obviously a very real association risk here. If a company makes the product you most hate to use... there are negative halo effects, just ask Meta.

Anyway, the good news for Google is that they may finally have the appropriate tools to combat the email problem. While they've long been inserting AI into Gmail here and there – the auto-completion/correction features were probably some of the first AI that a lot of the world engaged with in a forward-facing manner – Gemini now seems robust enough to insert it everywhere. They've obviously been ramping up doing that in Search so as best to disrupt themselves before someone else does, and now it would seem to be Gmail's turn.

In a blog post today, the company outlines what Gmail will look like in the "Gemini Era". A lot of it you've undoubtedly already seen in the form of 'AI Overviews' – though this is seemingly getting a nice expansion to your entire inbox based on queries, and not just individual overviews at the top of emails. But there's also the more standard and straightforward: 'Help Me Write', 'Suggested Replies', and, of course, 'Proofread'. But the real key is something you haven't seen to date: 'AI Inbox'.

While Google is just starting to test it now, you can see what it looks like and how it will function in their post. They describe it thusly:

Your inbox is filled with updates; some are critical, others are just noise. The new AI Inbox filters out the clutter so you can focus on what’s most important.

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. We’re giving trusted testers access to AI Inbox before making it more broadly available in the coming months.

The first part sounds like just an expansion of what Gmail has long done with algorithmic sorting. I turned this off long ago as I found it not that useful when it worked and insanely frustrating when it didn't. But the second part is the key. From the sound (and look) of it, 'AI Inbox' is going to completely blow up your inbox as you've known it to date.

To be clear, that old inbox will still be there. Google isn't crazy enough to force 3B+ users into this new reality – he says this and then immediately remembers Google+ being shoved in the faces of billions of users – but apparently there will be a new 'AI Inbox' in the sidebar above your regular, old, hated inbox.

And in this new inbox you'll find not email, but information. Things you need to know or do, automatically surfaced for you from that dreaded old inbox. The key, of course is Gemini. Google's AI may finally be good enough to fulfill the promise of killing your inbox. Or at least beating it into submission. A place you go from time to time when you want to remember the pain you left behind.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Plenty have promised such solutions in the past. For this to work, it has to be incredibly accurate and useful. It has to overcome old habits and falling back into the "I'll just reply to the email myself" mentality. Sure, it may take just a few seconds to respond to that email, but in aggregate, we're all spending hours every week and as such, days every year on email. Days. Completely consumed by email. Gone, never to come back. Because of the scale of your inbox.

Google can use that scale to their advantage to train their AI to make this work. No, they're not reading your emails to do this, but using other signals and data at scale to construct this new type of inbox. Honestly, they may be the only ones who can do this.

And if they do, it's step one to a potential true end of email. I mean, it will always stay around as a sort of fall-back – a true cockroach of the internet – but the way you interact with it will change drastically. I wrote about this topic last June in a post entitled: With AI, Email May Actually Morph Into a Task List. A couple passages I'll highlight since it was for members of The Inner Ring:

Moving this concept over to email, if AI can write your email and read your email, it's easy now to joke that in many jobs, such as the ones I've done in my career, you could just go on vacation. Of course, you couldn't really do that for the same reason as mentioned above: at some point, someone – a human – has to be in the loop about something. I mean, honestly, for a lot of email back-and-forths, probably not – but for some, there are real-world tasks to be completed. By someone. One day, bots – robots – may be able to handle those too. But in the more immediate future, I think this looks more like emails being distilled into actual action items.

Yes, your inbox will go from being a de-facto to-do list (generated by someone else), to an actual to-do list (generated by your AI).

To some, this will sound like absolute hell. But I suspect it may lead to actual productivity gains for most people because again, the scaling of the email inbox has become untenable. Boiling email down to its essence could work.

That's what Google is creating here with 'AI Inbox'. But again, it's just step one. The next step is obviously using AI Agents to do many of these tasks/to-dos created,² including responding to the messages:

Anyway, the point is that I can see a world where AI actually does lead to the end of email, in a way. It won't eliminate it, but it could eliminate your need to do it. Or, at the very least, cut back on it quite a bit because it will be abstracted into an AI layer above it, where you talk to your AI assistant about tasks and to-dos. Sure, you'll still be able to send it, but it will be more like disengaging the autopilot to fly manually. For most things, it will become something the bots do on your behalf.

Speaking of Agents:

And this antiquated technology could become the ultimate fallback for "agentic" communication when various newer protocols don't align for whatever reason. In many ways, email already is that fallback for many things today. Being the cockroach of the internet has some advantages...

Wouldn't that be fun? A sort of "have your agent email my agent"...³

One more thing: even beyond the whole end-of-email thing, there's another upside I see here, a broader one:

To others, this will sound downright dystopian. We're taking human-written email and turning it into bulleted action items generated by AI. But again, it feels inevitable. And, in many ways, needed.

Oddly, it may lead to a world in which letters – old school letters – make a comeback. I've long been of the notion that I think one of the second order effects of AI is that human-made creations will *increase* in value, and we might see something along these lines with handwritten notes.

Yes, this may lead to a new sub-economy where people are paid to write these personalized notes a la Theodore Twombly in 'Her'. Yes, this is a 'Her' reference without mentioning Samantha. Until now. Damnit.

Killing email to restore the value of writing to humanity. Who says no?

¹ I'm sure some have hated email longer than I have, but I'm very well documented... ↩

² We used to call these "bots" part 1. ↩

³ We used to call these "bots" part 2. ↩