I declared inbox bankruptcy a while back. With hundreds of new emails pouring in around the clock, inbox zero seemed like a pipe dream. I didn’t need another productivity tool; I needed an assistant to triage my inbox. So when at the 2024 I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google demoed how Gmail’s new AI sidekick could soon sift, summarize, and analyze emails for me, I was intrigued.
Google stepped into what it calls its “Gemini era” at this year’s I/O. In its lengthy two-hour-long Google I/O 2024 keynote, it showcased one after another how it plans to overhaul each of its key products, from Search to Android, with the capabilities of its new AI model front and center. But it was the series of Gmail upgrades that, if worked as intended, looked like they could end up truly delivering the most practical productivity boost for most people and exemplify Google’s theme for the next year: “making AI helpful for everyone.”
