It’s the week of circling back on those emails to sources you sent in December, and soon Google may determine whether you get a reply.
On Thursday, Google announced that it’ll start testing out a new AI Inbox tab, which will analyze the contents of a user’s emails, summarize them, and suggest action items. The AI Inbox is only available to “trusted testers” right now, but will be “more broadly available in the coming months,” according to the announcement.
“AI Inbox is like having a personalized briefing, highlighting to-dos and catching you up on what matters,” Gmail’s vice president of product Blake Barnes writes. “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.”
The sample in the announcement greets the user “Susan” by suggesting three action items and five topics to catch up on, all based on emails in Susan’s inbox. The suggestions include rescheduling a dentist appointment, replying to a kid’s coach, and paying a bill.
Barnes told Wired that users’ emails won’t be used as training data for Gemini and that they can opt out of the feature when it becomes available to the public.
The blog post makes no mention of how the AI Inbox will handle, filter, or prioritize newsletters — a staple in news outlets’ distribution and audience engagement strategies and the lifeblood for independent journalists and writers. It also remains to be seen how news alerts will be presented in the AI Inbox and how Gemini will frame them.
Wired’s Reece Rogers noted the first iteration of AI Inbox was not exactly a smashing success.
“Despite the continued spread of generative AI features, the underlying reliability of these tools remains iffy,” Rogers writes. “Back in 2023, when Google’s chatbot was still called ‘Bard,’ I tested the company’s nascent Gmail extension that tried to summarize my messages and search through the inbox for insights. At the time, this extension was a complete bust, with a bevy of incorrect responses.”
Google is starting to test a potentially radical reinvention of Gmail — a new “AI Inbox” that’s essentially Search’s AI Mode but for your Inbox.
www.theverge.com/news/857883/…
— Jay Peters (@jaypeters.net) January 8, 2026 at 8:19 AM
I don’t need AI summaries of my emails. I need fewer emails thanks to better filters
www.theverge.com/news/857883/…
— Steve Kovach (@stevekovach.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 11:58 AM
Read the full announcement here.