On Tuesday, Google showed off the future of Gmail at Google I/O: the ability to question email threads and even command it to perform tasks in the background via AI agents.
It’s an important evolution, one that recognizes that the reason Gmail became so popular is because email is intrinsically complex, with questions and replies and attachments all over the place. Google is using its Gemini AI search to help make sense of it all.
But — and this is a big but — this isn’t here yet. It will roll out in Google’s Labs workspace this fall. And even then, consumers will have to pay a whopping $19.95 per user per month for the Google AI Premium plan that makes it all happen.
Gmail Q&A
In a demonstration, Aparna Pappu, Google’s vice president of Workspace, explained how integrating Gemini could be used to quickly catch up on an email chain. In a demo, Pappu asked Gemini to sum up an exchange with a roofer, including what the proposed project would cost.
Gemini did so, but it went much further: it also was able to sum up competing quotes from other contractors and present them in a unified format. Gemini then proposed several replies, and let Pappu pick what response she would send back. It’s a capability that Google will roll out this month as part of its Labs.Google beta program, while the contextual replies will be added (again, in Labs) in July.