This week, Google announced: New AI inbox view Gmail replaces traditional email lists with AI-generated to-do and topic lists that you track based on what’s in your inbox. Although it’s not widely available yet, I had access to it, and after playing around with it for a few hours, I found out how helpful and even transformative AI Inbox is for managing your inbox. However, the way we manage email is not changing at this time, and we don’t know if it will change in the future.

Before we get into it, a few things need to be noted. AI Inbox is a very early product and is currently only available to “trusted testers”. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to use this yourself yet, and the current situation may not be representative of what it will look like when it’s widely available. This feature currently only works with personal Gmail accounts, not Workspace accounts. So I could only check my personal inbox and it didn’t work with my very busy work inbox.

But as someone who is already in a very tight spot when it comes to email, I was curious to see if AI Inbox could further improve my near-zero inbox system.

As I wrote this on Friday, I had six emails in my personal inbox.

For me, this is a high number. Rather than decide as quickly as possible whether the email should be processed or not, I left it alone to see how AI Inbox would process the email.

But when you click the new AI inbox icon in the sidebar above your traditional inbox, your inbox will look completely different after a few seconds of loading.

With AI Inbox, my inbox becomes a page of short, AI-generated summaries to read. At the top, you’ll see suggested to-dos and links to emails about them if you want to learn more or respond. Below To-Do, you’ll find topics to keep up with, as well as links to related emails. Perhaps most notably, AI Inbox pulled in two things that I had archived and didn’t have in my main inbox. It’s a conversation my wife and I have about tax preparation and potty training our toddler.

it’s all like Google search AI modeHowever, this is the case with Gmail. Similar to AI mode, I don’t think AI Inbox is for me either.

I’ve been actively using email since my teens, so I’ve spent decades honing my personal email management system at this point. My philosophy is to keep my inbox neat, organized, and compact. I decide as soon as possible what I need to do with the email (read it, reply to it, create a reminder, etc.) and archive it.

AI Inbox, on the other hand, fills the screen with unnecessary information. To see the full AI Inbox overview, you have to scroll down on your 13-inch MacBook Air screen, but in a regular Inbox, you can only see six email threads. Also, the tool is incorrectly guessing what is relevant to me at the moment. It doesn’t seem to take into account that I only keep things in my inbox that I need to think about what to do with. Yes, my wife and I need to file our tax returns with our accountant, but we don’t have to do it today, we already have a plan for when we need to file them. Potty training plans are also something my wife and I actively discuss in real life, so I don’t have to keep up.

That said, if you’re not as ruthless as I am when it comes to organizing your emails and organizing your tasks, I can see how these nudges and suggestions from AI Inbox can be helpful. In an interview with The VergeBlake Barnes, Google’s vice president of Gmail products, said the company is seeing people treating AI Inbox as a tool that complements the core inbox flow, and he thinks that’s the right way to look at it right now.

I’d also like to reiterate that AI Inbox is a very early product that isn’t very popular, and Google seems to have a lot of ideas on how to improve it. Barnes said the company is working on a way to mark one of the proposed items as complete. He said Google is considering adding quick reply buttons to AI Inbox suggestions and possibly suggesting draft responses. The company wants to integrate AI Inbox with Google Calendar to be able to pre-load suggested times into a proposed draft when someone invites you to a meeting. He even explained that users will eventually be able to simply tell AI Inbox to pay attention to emails from specific people.

If Google’s bigger ideas for AI Inbox come to fruition, we’ll see how Gmail transforms from a constant bombardment of information to an AI-powered personal assistant. Depending on how much you rely on email in your life, this may be very helpful. But if AI Inbox is going to do that, you’re putting a lot of trust in Google’s AI to handle that workload, rather than coming up with your own system to manage your inbox the way you want it.

Just as Google has rapidly expanded AI modes, I expect to see something similar with AI Inbox, and it will probably become a tool in my arsenal in the future. Also, I’ve only been playing around with AI Inbox since Thursday night, so my opinion may change as I continue using it. But for now, I don’t think I’ll be using AI Inbox much. Maybe I’m stuck in my ways, but my system has worked very well for me and I think it will hold up for many years to come.