Since stepping into his role as vice president of product for Gmail in January 2025, Blake Barnes has been tasked with shepherding one of the internet’s most beloved platforms into the generative AI revolution.
His overarching vision, he told Fortune in a recent interview, is to bring Gmail into the “Gemini era,” transforming it into a “personal and proactive inbox assistant” for its 3 billion global users. To this end, Gmail launched a suite of AI-powered updates this January, including AI overviews in Gmail Search, where you can “ask your inbox anything.” It also introduced a feature where AI drafts a reply based on context, and a user decides whether to send, edit, or ignore. The catch, Barnes explained, is that when it comes to having the ideal email assistant, “everyone has a different version of what that means to them.”
