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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Gmail is being rethought as a proactive assistant system.
- Google is cautious about changing workflows used by billions.
- This vision is exploratory, ambitious, and far from finished.
What is the first thing you do in the morning? For me, before I gaze lovingly at my wife and pup, and before I get coffee, I glance at my Gmail and my Slack feed. It lets me quickly ascertain whether something happened overnight that’s going to demand my attention immediately during the day.
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If there’s something hot, that changes my pacing. As soon as I do the most minimal of morning prep, I’ll sit myself down at the computer to deal with whatever is breaking. If there’s nothing on fire, I know I can have a leisurely wake-up and morning prep, gently easing into my workday.
Not everyone has my morning threat-assessment ritual. But there are roughly three billion (yes, billion) people who use Gmail. There are billions of people who, like me, spend hours each day in the app, managing their lives. There are billions of people for whom Gmail is, quite literally, the central dashboard of their lives.
The man we’re going to meet today in this article has one heck of a job. As Gmail’s VP of Product, Blake Barnes and his team have the incredible responsibility of crafting how billions of us will be spending our lives using Gmail, now and into the future.
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First, though, I made him a promise. This is the part I want you to pay special attention to. I told him that I would make it very clear that many of the forward-looking thoughts Blake shared are just that: future-looking ideas. These are not product commitments.
He wants to share with you, “What you can expect without making promises of exactly what is coming or when it’s coming.”
Email is more than just email
Last week, when I covered Gmail’s new AI features, I was somewhat disappointed. Some of the features announced weren’t available to me. Some were features I just didn’t see myself using. Some features I tried produced errors, as AI often does.
But my discussion with Barnes course-corrected my interpretation.
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Gmail’s AI update isn’t just about the ability to summarize a thread or draft a reply. Those features are now basic table stakes in anything that can make an AI API call. What’s interesting is that Google is on a path where it is trying to redefine and refine what an inbox can do for you.
Our long-held paradigm is that Gmail (and email in general) is something of a container, where messages flow in and out. But in my conversation with Barnes, he shared that Google recognizes that many of us now use email to run our weeks, not just read or send messages.
So, yes. The new update does showcase some new AI features. But don’t think of it as a tidy list on some marketing spreadsheet somewhere.
Barnes told me, “I think what we’d want to communicate to the readers is just when we are working on these features in Gmail, and we’re thinking about how we can make this product more useful to folks, we’re trying to do a couple things.”
He said it is trying to stay focused on the problems that a lot of us experience day to day. The world is busy, there’s lots going on, there’s lots to juggle, and there’s lots of life management tasks to handle, whether that’s traveling, whether that’s communicating with friends and family, or whether it’s working through errands.
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Essentially, Google is working on the premise that if email sits at the center of work and personal logistics, then the inbox can’t just remain a passive stream.
He told me, “Ultimately, all of these things ladder up to the vision of trying to help people to manage their life and not just their messages.”
Moving from sorting to interpretation
Gmail’s traditional organizational tools have consisted of labels, categories, and filters. These are similar to the minimal automation tools in most other email systems, and they haven’t really changed much in decades.
Our inboxes have worked pretty much like plumbing: route the flow, reduce the pressure, and hopefully keep the system from backing up. Everyone is drowning in email. But here’s the thing: How that flow affects us is different from person to person.
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Our inboxes aren’t just overwhelmed by volume, although for those of us with enormous incoming traffic, it can seem extreme. Rather, the problem is ambiguity. For example, I get email all the time from and about Google. A simple filter won’t help.
Do I filter the status messages I get as the admin of my company’s Workspace account? Do I filter the promotional emails I get from Google and the various Google-adjacent services? What about all the press releases from Google’s nearly constant flow of innovation? And what about the super-rare opportunity when a key Google executive is willing to sit down and talk?
Filters don’t understand context.
Barnes talked briefly about the new AI inbox feature, saying it’s a “forward-looking view of how we can really evolve Gmail into this personal proactive inbox assistant by helping you understand what’s most important in your inbox, as well as giving you a lay of the land of things that you might have missed in the catch-me-up section.”
I still don’t have access to that feature because it’s rolling out slowly. But it’s only a first step. Barnes says there are, “a couple things in there that are really interesting, that are areas that we are extending the product into and have aspirations to expand AI Inbox and other tools too.”
He says, “AI is really helpful and useful when it comes to personalization because it allows you to classify things at scale. You want it to learn who you are, and you want it to understand what to do with that information once you’ve given it to it.”
Barnes posed a question, “What if in natural language you could tell us what cluster you want to see, and what groupings of information you want to see? That would allow you to see that grouping and then figure out what the updates were from that grouping in a very high-level summarized way.”
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Barnes is showing a subtle but important repositioning of Gmail into the future. As time goes on, the hope is that Gmail won’t just try to help you process messages faster, it will also try to help reduce the decision fatigue that comes from a never-ending inbox.
What he described was a service that’s less about “where does this go?” and more about “what does this mean for me?” Essentially, it is not looking at just creating a cleaner or less-cluttered inbox (which, frankly, is my goal). What it is trying to do is reduce the number of judgment calls we humans have to make just to stay current with the email flow.
Understanding relationships and nuance
Filters are brittle. But, as mentioned above, a busy life tends to stack multiple relationships on top of the same brands, domains, and organizations. Our inboxes don’t just need to identify a sender or a message string, they need to understand what relationship the sender has to us in that moment, for that message, in that context. Is it a customer, a marketer, a partner, a colleague, a vendor, a friend, or just an annoyance?
This is where it gets fascinating. Our experience with email has been treating email as string-based objects, in the guise of boxes, folders, and labels. But Barnes says Google is looking toward an inbox that treats messages as events inside messages.
In response to some of my email flow challenges, he said, “You may have a filter that says anything from Google, do this with it, but that’s not what you’re looking for in this context. You’re not looking for a simple anything from Google, apply this label.”
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He understands that we have a variety of relationships with companies. He said, “Your inbox needs to understand that nuance, and understand the differences in these types of relationships you have in the world. And I think that a little bit of what we’re trying to build is a product that really gets at the root of your goals and what you’re looking to accomplish.”
That is the quote that feels like the real reveal. A senior Gmail leader is explicitly describing the limits of the core organizational functions email has relied on for decades.
If you take Barnes literally, Gmail’s future goes far beyond basic classification to a relationship-aware interpretation, where the same sender can mean different things depending on context.
There are some giant implications here. First, a relationship-aware inbox would need to understand identity, history, intent, and goals. That’s a lot more than just keywords and metadata.
Of course, there’s a security and privacy rabbit hole here. Do you want Google to be able to interpret all that? We’ve given our social graph to Facebook, so it’s not a completely new idea.
But my Gmail archive is probably the single most comprehensive data archive of my life, anywhere. It goes back 20 years, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, holding all the correspondence I’ve had. Google has had access to all that private information for years.
But I want Gmail to work for me. I want it to know and understand my relationships and activities using that very personal and very comprehensive archive of my interactions. This is where Gmail starts to look less like mail software and more like a personal system that models your world.
Once again, I promised I’d share his forward-looking caution with you. He told me, “This is the future that we sort of see, and this is the sort of path that we think our products are headed towards. I want to make sure we don’t overpromise to our users.”
Gmail as an assistant
Then we started to talk about the idea that Gmail becomes an active assistant. This is where Gmail might become something you direct, rather than something you have to constantly clean.
Barnes gave this example, “Imagine a world where every Friday afternoon you pick up your Gmail app and you talk to it. And you say, ‘Hey, here are the things that are important for me next week. I’m writing this email on Google, so if Jenny or Blake sends me a message or a new asset, let me know. I’m also thinking about exploring stuff around what just happened in Davos. At the same time, I’m really looking for a message from my friend Tim. I want to make sure I don’t lose that. And as always, keep me informed about what’s going on in my local neighborhood.'”
The expectation is that Gmail won’t just listen to instructions. It could operate in the background on your behalf. In other words, Gmail could become an AI agent. The idea is that you would be be able to tell Gmail what you’re trying to accomplish, and let it do the sorting, clustering, and surfacing while you do other work.
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I believe this is very possible. I’ve been working with OpenAI’s Codex and Claude Code to do just this sort of agent-level work with programming. Why couldn’t it work with my email?
Barnes seems to agree, or at least share the vision. He told me, “And you tell it that thing in a very casual conversation, maybe even as you’re driving or whatever the case may be, and then your email over the course of that week does what you’re looking for it to do. It surfaces the information that matters to you most, it clusters the emails, it perhaps even does some triage for you, and maybe even drafts some replies that you can then review and send.”
This is a very tough hill for Google’s AI programmers to climb. If we’re all to be able to rely on a Gmail AI to effectively triage our email, it will need to be trustworthy, explainable, and any actions the AI takes must be able to be undone.
Compared to the challenge here, generative AI that can draft a paragraph or two seems simple. For Gmail to function as an assistant, it will need to consistently decide what you see, and be right often enough that you’re willing to rely upon it.
Why AI Inbox is separated, and why Google is careful
Finally, we spent some time talking about Gmail’s AI Inbox, which was announced this month. Google is keeping it separate from the inbox we all know and love. He described this separation as respect.
Barnes said, “We take a great deal of care with each addition we make to the product, because we know how important the tool is to people and how much it means to them.”
He told me that his team considers the traditional inbox as almost sacred territory. Over the years, developers have come to know that one of the best ways to alienate users is to “improve” their software in ways that get in the way of established workflow.
He said, “And this is actually one of the reasons why we’re developing AI Inbox in an entirely different tab, an entirely different space, because we recognize the reverence for the traditional inbox and the workflows that people have built, the labels that they use to manage their life or any number of other things, and any number of other customization features that people are using that we’ve put out over the years.”
He told me, “And so every little feature we do, we tend to spend a lot of time on how to do that.”
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Once again, let me remind you that the items we discussed aren’t features Google is promising. Instead, we’ve had the opportunity to take a look at the thought processes the company is going through as it tries to plan for the future, one where Gmail could be an assistant that understands intent, relationships, and context.
“We’re not going to be able to do it overnight,” Barnes told me. “It’s going to take us to get the pieces in place, learn things along the way about what works and what doesn’t, and figure out how to do this at a scale where it works for billions of people.”
The man has a big job ahead. He told ZDNET, “Trying to get it right for three billion people is a hard task, but it’s something that we feel a privilege to do.”
What about you? If Gmail started acting more like an assistant, surfacing what matters, clustering messages, and even triaging and drafting replies, would that feel helpful or intrusive? Do you like the idea of telling your inbox what matters in plain language, or do you prefer to manage email with labels, filters, and your own routines? And where do you draw the line on personalization, given how much of your life already lives in your Gmail history? Let us know in the comments below.
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