If your inbox feels like a never-ending avalanche of messages, Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) (GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai thinks he has your solution. On Thursday, Pichai announced that Google is bringing Gmail into what he calls the "Gemini era," deploying artificial intelligence to help users actually manage the hundreds of emails they receive every week.
The Biggest Gmail Makeover in Two Decades
Google's rolling out deep integration of Gemini, its flagship AI model, into Gmail. This represents the email service's most dramatic transformation since it launched on April Fool's Day in 2004, when a gigabyte of free storage seemed almost too good to be true.
Pichai acknowledged that email has fundamentally changed since then. "We launched Gmail on April Fool's Day in 2004," Pichai wrote on X. "20+ years later, we're bringing Gmail into the Gemini era."
AI Summaries for Those Endless Email Chains
The centerpiece feature is AI Overviews, which summarizes lengthy email conversations automatically. Anyone who's ever scrolled through a 47-message thread trying to figure out what actually got decided will appreciate this one. Google says the tool helps users quickly grasp discussions without reading every single message, which is exactly the kind of pain point that makes corporate email chains so exhausting.
Similar to AI summaries in Google Search, users can also ask questions about their inbox, making it easier to surface relevant information without endless scrolling.