Gmail, AI revolution to turn the inbox into a personal assistant

New year, new Gmail. And this time it is not a simple makeover: Mountain View has decided to bring the world's most widely used mail service - used by more than 1.8 billion monthly active users - into the Gemini 3 era, transforming it from a simple repository of messages into a true proactive personal assistant, rethinking the inbox as an intelligent command centre, capable of synthesising information, establishing priorities and anticipating the user's needs. And that's the point: according to Google's internal data, 85% of users consider artificial intelligence most useful when it is personalised to their content. Not surprisingly, 92 per cent of knowledge workers between the ages of 22 and 39, according to a survey conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of Google Workspace, want an AI with personalisation capabilities.

Perhaps the most significant novelty is called AI Overviews, and it promises to facilitate searches in one's inbox, without having to sift through dozens of emails to find a specific piece of information. Exactly as in Google Search, AI Overviews turn information into direct answers, without having to dig deep into the inbox or among trashed emails. The mechanism is as simple as it is powerful: instead of remembering precise keywords, just ask in natural language "Who was the plumber who gave me an estimate for my bathroom last year?". Gemini's advanced reasoning extracts the answer and summarises the necessary details. For long conversations there is automatic summarisation when the thread opens, highlighting key points. The basic version of AI Overviews, the one that summarises long threads, is available to everyone free of charge, while the advanced search function is reserved for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers.

Help Me Write' will also become accessible to everyone free of charge. The function allows email drafts to be generated from a single prompt, leaving the user to refine the text. But the real treat are the new Suggested Replies, an evolution of Smart Replies: one-click contextual replies that respect tone and personal style. Added to these is Proofread, an advanced revision tool that intervenes on grammar, vocabulary, syntax and consistency of tone. A function designed especially for those who use email as a daily work tool, also available for subscribers to Google's AI plans.

Again, this is a function that is widely used by users. Google's internal data show that 70 per cent of enterprise users who use Help Me Write in Docs or Gmail end up accepting Gemini's suggestions, a sign of growing confidence in the automation of communication processes.

The most ambitious feature, still in a limited test phase, is called AI Inbox. A new type of inbox visualisation whose aim is to automatically filter out important messages in order to focus on what really matters. The inbox is organised into two main sections: Priorities, which shows an overview of important emails with their deadlines, and Catch me up, a summary of all life events that come through Gmail such as upcoming bookings, purchases and deliveries, cancelled or rescheduled classes. A 'magic' made possible by artificial intelligence, which identifies the most important priorities based on signals such as frequency of communication, saved contacts and relationships inferred from the content of messages. All this, Google assures us, is done with the usual levels of security and data control, keeping the data under the user's control.