Are we living through the AI Overviews era for email? On March 31, Gmail announced AI Inbox, promising to free users from ever having to reach Inbox Zero again. Much like Google started answering search queries before people clicked a link, Gmail now wants AI to decide which emails matter before people even scroll through their inboxes.
It’s even promising to make getting to Inbox Zero a thing of the past. This is kind of a big deal, considering Gmail users account for more than 25% of the world’s inboxes. That might be half of Apple’s market share, but if you’re doing email marketing, it’s nothing to sniff at.
I asked six email marketers and operators I respect what this kind of AI in the inbox update means for us. Here’s what they said.
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What Gmail’s AI for Inbox could mean for marketers
Manu Cinca, the founder of Stacked Marketer, believes email is becoming about discoverability rather than just deliverability.
“After Gmail introduced the different tabs, landing in Primary or Updates got better performance on average, so deliverability was key,” he says. “With AI Inbox, your email will be one of many that Gemini pulls into a summary, so it’s about convincing Gemini to show your email and content to the user. Because if Gemini becomes the gatekeeper, you might no longer have a direct connection with a subscriber.”
Tyler Cook, the founder and head email marketing nerd at Hypermedia Marketing, agrees.
“Content and context are going to play a larger role moving forward. In terms of content, eventually we’ll be able to ‘chat’ with our inbox to find information. Brands will need to think about their content pillars so when a subscriber searches for information on a topic, their brand is shown in the results.
“Context will change the game because AI could theoretically surface a marketing email that seems to be related to their work tasks.”
Read Gmail’s announcement, and you’ll see it’s obvious Gmail intends to organize, prioritize, and surface emails for readers based on relevance and function.
Gabby Kustner, the senior growth marketing manager at Customer.io, says marketers will need to be unequivocal when writing email copy.
“We will have to carefully frame our language in such a way that an agent understands what is high vs. low priority for the email’s reader. We won’t necessarily be able to rely on the right side and left side of the human brain connecting the dots between visuals, headlines, and CTAs on what’s most important for them to pay attention to, if we don’t make it explicit.”
Matthew Gal, founder of The Kaizen Blitz, seconds that.
“There’s going to be more pressure to be clear, direct, and easy to understand so both the reader and AI can pick up on what’s important.”
Dave Schools, the CEO and co-founder of Singulate, believes AI Inbox will change deliverability, too.
“You may make it into the inbox, but AI will determine how visible it is to the recipient. Gmail’s new AI Inbox means the differentiation between ‘deprioritized generic blast’ and ‘relevant, important message’ has never been higher stakes. Deliverability will have shades. It will no longer be pass/fail.”
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Marc Thomas, the founder of Positive Human, said this could be good news for marketers.
“I think Gmail’s AI inbox kind of will benefit, in some ways, good email marketing, and will continue to punish bad email marketing,” he says. “It effectively surfaces good information, which is what you should have been sending the whole time, and relegates poor information or purely promotional information to more of a ‘potluck.’”
That means a better inbox experience for marketers and better outcomes for skilled marketers managing excellent email programs.
My takeaway: Given Gmail’s AI Inbox prioritizes to-dos and topics to catch up on, I imagine functional emails will get higher priority, while promotional emails will get buried or deprioritized. Gmail wants users to enjoy and actively use its products, after all.
Now, if people do go all in on this, the Primary tab could end up being just another inbox folder, kind of like Promotions and Social.
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In fact, it could potentially become more generic than that because the Promotions and Social tabs are still intent signals. If you’re visiting them, you’re looking for products or people, and you’re more likely to click through.
Is this the end of email as we know it?
Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
Cook cautions that “there are still so many unknowns as to how this feature will really work. The AI Inbox will change behavior for sure, but it’s hard to guess in which ways.”
“A lot of online marketers overestimate how fast this will actually change user behavior,” says Matthew Gal. “We’re all pretty deep in this space, but most people aren’t keeping up with AI updates day to day. On top of that, Google hasn’t always been great at making users aware of new features inside Gmail, so adoption is probably going to be slower than people expect.”
Adoption aside, Gal also believes it’s highly likely that “a majority of users will keep going through their inbox the same way they always have. From what I see, this doesn’t really change much in the near term from a revenue standpoint.”
My takeaway: AI Inbox is currently only available on Gmail’s most expensive tier, which is $250/month. That’s a steep barrier to entry on its own, so I don’t imagine we’ll see immediate, widespread adoption.
I’m also inclined to agree with Gal: marketers are deep into AI. Most people outside marketing aren’t.
Gmail’s AI Inbox isn’t replacing the Primary inbox. It’s essentially another tab. So even if AI Inboxes and related products are offered to users, there’s a big question mark around how many people will actually use them.
Granted, “agentic inboxes are here to stay,” as Kustner points out, so it’s worth updating your email marketing strategy regardless. The question is, how?
What marketers can do to prepare and adapt
Gal may have reservations about the broad impact of AI Inbox, but he still believes it should change how we write and structure emails.
“We’ll probably move toward native-text emails, so every image will need alt text so AI can understand the content of the email.”
Kustner recommends feeding Google Studio’s flow template instructions to your email tool or AI tool of choice, and giving it your email copy to see how it can improve. “When I fed Claude Google Studio’s instructions, it made suggestions to CTAs I have in emails,” she said.
A lot of email marketing advice is to “send more email.” Does that still hold?
Thomas says yes. “You should be sending more email, but you should be sending email that’s genuinely useful to users and also contributes value, as well as extracting it.”
One way to contribute that value, as Schools pointed out, is through personalization.
“Can your content eliminate filler content and deliver obvious value immediately at the contact level? Gmail’s AI prioritizes concrete, actionable information for its users over emotional language or marketing fluff, so content personalization strategy will likely become your greatest deliverability signal.”
My two cents: Sender reputation and engagement history have always mattered, but they matter now more than ever, especially for contacts using AI inboxes.
If Gmail doesn’t recognize a pattern of positive engagement between you and a recipient, your emails may never surface in the first place, so build welcome, follow-up, re-engagement, and nurture flows, earn consent through opt-ins, and clean your lists and CRMs regularly.
What marketers should not do
Cinca predicts some marketers will get creative with making their emails look like a to-do, bill, event, or whatever else Gemini considers important.
Kustner tells me it’s already happening.
“This morning I received a cold email with the subject line ‘Action Required: Pausing Campaign.’ You won’t be surprised to hear that there was neither any action required nor a campaign being paused that I needed to look at.”
Please, don’t do this.
“You may land high in an inbox once with a trick like that,” Kustner warns, “but it’s a fast track to the spam folder and is not a sustainable tactic.”
The inbox is becoming algorithmic
Whether or not agentic inboxes radically change user behavior, one thing stands out to me: You don’t really own your list like you once did. Now, you have to earn inbox placement.
ISPs are to email marketing what algorithms are to social media. Plan accordingly.
