• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, 2 hours ago

Few marketers are ready for Gmail’s recent AI inbox overhaul. Why would they be?

“Instead of serving as a static source of messages that require clicks to deliver their information payloads, the inbox will be the next battleground for agentic AI — an autonomous system that can prioritize messages, sum up their contents and use the information to develop personalized action plans based on what they have learned from our own daily use,” Ryan Phelan, CEO of RPEOrigin, explains in MarTech. 

This isn’t all bad. Phelan predicts that inbox providers will use AI “to drive drastic changes, to reduce the noise in their users’ inboxes, to make it a cleaner experience and to make the inbox experience even more relevant.”

That said, Google is not a friendly partner. In 2024, it introduced AI Overviews, which provides summaries that people can read without clicking through to the original article. 

Search traffic plummeted for some publishers -- up to 40% -- gravely harming their ad revenue.

And Google really is just starting with its mischief.

“Although some phases are still rolling in, Gmail is reordering my emails based on when I engaged with senders, rather than when I received them,” Phelan says. 

He continues, “Within the next two to three years (my money is on sooner, not later), we’ll see a fuller AI implementation. Gmail will pull in all the data points it has on your activity across all sources — browse history, purchases, click behavior and whatever else it can track. 

“Then, instead of siloing emails in tabs, it will give you a unified experience based on what its algorithm predicts you want to see most.”

Take this as a warning from an authority -- Phelan is one of the savviest people in this business.. The email landscape is changing in ways that couldn’t have been predicted a decade ago.