Gmail sorts your email for you. Well, almost.
Google is opening its AI Inbox to businesses: Gmail spots what you need to do and summarises what you missed. For now in the United States only, but it's worth getting ready.
Only one update caught our eye this week, but it affects the tool everyone opens first thing in the morning: Gmail.
What’s changing
Google is extending its AI Inbox to paid Google Workspace accounts. In practice, Gemini reads your email and shows two sections at the top of Gmail:
- suggested to-dos: what you’re being asked to do, with the deadlines, picked out of the body of the messages;
- topics to catch up on: a summary of the important conversations, even when they stretch across dozens of emails.
The idea is simple: stop rereading fifteen messages to find out where a project stands, and stop letting a request get buried in the middle of a thread.
The detail that matters: not in Europe yet
For now, the feature is only available in the United States, and only for accounts set to US English. Google gives no date for the rest of the world.
In other words, your teams won’t see it tomorrow morning. But when it does arrive, it will be there all at once, for everyone: Google hasn’t provided any admin setting to switch it on or off.
Licences affected: Business Starter, Standard and Plus, Enterprise Starter, Standard and Plus, Frontline Plus, and Google AI Pro for Education. Google says Starter and Education editions will get it later, in the coming months.
Our take
It’s a real gain for anyone drowning in email, as long as you keep two things in mind:
- a suggested to-do is only a suggestion. The AI can miss a request slipped in at the end of a message, or invent one. It helps you forget nothing; it doesn’t replace reading the important messages;
- the summary depends on what’s written down. If decisions are made on the phone and never confirmed in writing, no summary will find them.
The right time to prepare your teams is before the feature arrives: explain what it does, what it doesn’t, and remind everyone that important decisions get written down in black and white.
Want to know how Gemini can fit into your organisation without nasty surprises? Let’s talk.