Google LLC is making some sweeping changes to Gmail, integrating Gemini-powered artificial intelligence capabilities throughout its flagship email service in an effort to transform it into a “personal, proactive inbox assistant.”

The updates introduced today represent one of the company’s most aggressive pushes towards normalizing AI automation so far and will likely escalate its growing rivalry with competitors such as Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI Group PBC. Gemini is at the cornerstone of all of the new capabilities, and will now be on hand to help Gmail users sort their communications out by priority, automate tasks such as writing emails and even generate visual content.

The most prominent change is the new AI Inbox view, which is rolling out to some users from today. It departs from the traditional, chronological list of emails and instead uses on-device AI smarts to try and organize users’ emails into “priority clusters.” At the same time, it also tries to help users keep on top of everything that’s happened while they’ve been away with a “Catch me up” summary of their most recent email activity, offering quick updates on things such as shipping activity, purchase receipts and appointment bookings.

“This is us delivering on Gmail proactively having your back,” Google Gmail Vice President of Product Blake Barnes said in a blog post. According to him, Gemini is transforming Gmail into more of a “thought partner” that has the ability to answer complex questions about user’s digital lives. For instance, someone could ask Gemini “When does my flight land?” and it will quickly provide the answer, without requiring the user to click on anything themselves.

The update also expands Google’s “Help Me Write” tool, which has previously been a premium feature in Gmail but is now being made available to all users. It also gains enhanced tone-matching functions, Google said, which means it’s capable of mimicking the user’s writing style to make its suggested emails more realistic.

Google said the new features are coming to users in the U.S. first. While some of the new capabilities are free for everyone – such as Help Me Write and the email thread summaries – others are being offered as premium capabilities. To be able to ask Gemini questions across their entire email inbox, users must have a paid Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription. As for the new AI Inbox view, that’s currently limited to a few “trusted testers,” and not yet publicly available.

The update is one of the most comprehensive rollouts of AI automation Google has ever undertaken. Gmail holds about a 30% share of the global email client market, second behind only Apple Mail, which ranks higher since it’s the default for iPhone users, though it’s often used to access Gmail accounts. All told, Gmail has about 1.8 billion global users.

Whether Google will face any kind of privacy pushback remains to be seen. Google seems to anticipate this, for it stressed that though Gemini will be processing user’s inbox data to provide summaries and answer questions, all of that data will remain behind a secure “engineering privacy” barrier. The company also explicitly states that nobody’s Gmail content is going to be used to train its public AI models.

To reassure users further, Google also announced the launch of a new “Temporary Chat” feature within the Gemini application. This is similar to the “incognito mode” in Google Chrome, and allows users to engage in one-off conversations with Gemini safe in the knowledge that whatever they say will not be retained or used for training purposes.

Images: Google