Email summaries are now built into Gmail — Here’s what it means
If you’re not into it, you can turn it off, though.
AI features might no longer be optional add-ons anymore and would be baked into the experience.
Google has been gradually weaving AI into its products for years, but now it’s doing it more boldly. Last year, the company added an on-demand email summarizer in Gmail to help digest long emails at a glance. Now, it seems these summaries will appear automatically in the Gmail app for Android and iOS.
Until now, users had to tap a “Summarise this email” button to generate a brief AI-generated digest of long messages or email threads. Clicking the button would trigger Gemini, Google’s generative AI, to break things down into a few bullet points.
But Google is removing that step. The system will now proactively summarise messages it deems complex or lengthy, no tapping required.
These summaries would show up at the top of the email, much like Google’s AI Overviews in Search. That placement can be helpful, but it also pushes the actual email content farther down the screen, which some people might find annoying.
Henry Chikwem
If you’re not into it, you can turn it off, though.
These summaries fall under Gmail’s “smart features” setting. If you turn that off, the automatic summaries go away, but it’ll also disable other tools like Smart Compose, Smart Reply, package tracking updates, and nudges for follow-ups. In short, if you want full control over what AI does in your inbox, you’ll have to give up more than just the automatic summaries.
Only countries like Europe and Japan have the smart features turned off by default due to stricter privacy laws. Elsewhere, they’re enabled by default unless you go into settings and switch them off. But even if you turn it off, Gmail may periodically nudge you to turn it back on.
Google is clearly pushing AI deeper into everyday workflows. Whether you find that helpful or intrusive, the shift is happening. With this trend, AI tools might not just be optional extras anymore, they’d become how Gmail works.
This feature is rolling out gradually (within 15 days) for English-language emails. It’s limited to paying users: Google Workspace subscribers and users with AI Premium plans for now, but broader availability seems inevitable. It’s unclear whether free Gmail accounts will see the change soon or whether it’ll come to the desktop version.
Oluwaseun Bamisile
