More and more artificial intelligence is being implanted into Gmail as Google tries to turn the world’s most popular email service into a personal assistant that can improve writing, summarize extensive information in the inbox and deliver daily to-do lists.
The new AI features announced Thursday could herald a pivotal moment for Gmail, a service that transformed email when it was introduced nearly 22 years ago. Since then, Gmail has amassed more than 3 billion users and is almost as ubiquitous as Google’s search engine.
Gmail’s new AI options will initially only be available in English in the United States, but the company promises to expand the technology to other countries and other languages over the course of the year.
The most widely available tool will be a “Help Me Write” option, designed to learn a user’s writing style so they can personalize emails and make real-time suggestions on how the message can be polished.
Google also offers subscribers who pay for the Pro and Ultra services access to technology that mirrors the AI summaries built into the search engine since 2023. The extension allows subscribers to ask conversational questions in Gmail’s search bar to get instant answers to the information they’re trying to retrieve from their inbox.
In what could be the next revolutionary step, “AI Inbox” is also being rolled out to a subset of “trusted testers” in the US. When enabled, the feature searches inboxes and suggests to-do lists and topics that users may want to explore.
“This is us proactively delivering Gmail and being here for you,” said Blake Barnes, vice president of product at Google.
All the new technology is linked to Google’s latest AI model, Gemini 3, which was launched in the search engine late last year. The upgrade, designed to turn Google Search into a “thought partner,” has been so well received that it prompted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company makes the popular ChatGPT chatbot, to issue a “code red” after its release.
But bringing more AI into Gmail comes with potential risks for Google, especially if the technology malfunctions and presents misleading information or crafts emails that get users in trouble — even though people can proofread the messages or disable the features at any time.
Allowing Google’s AI to dig deeper into the inbox to learn more about their habits and interests could also lead to privacy concerns – a challenge Gmail has faced from the start.
To help subsidize the free service, Google included targeted ads in Gmail based on information from the electronic conversations. That twist initially sparked a privacy backlash among lawmakers and consumer groups, but the uproar eventually died down and never stopped Gmail’s rapid growth as an email provider. Rivals eventually adopted similar features.
As it brings more AI to Gmail, Google promises that content from its technology analytics will not be used to train the models that help improve Gemini. The Mountain View, California-based company says it has also built a “technical privacy barrier” to gather all the information in the inbox and protect it from prying eyes.
