Gmail’s AI summaries now appear automatically

Google Workspace users are going to see a lot more of Gemini’s efforts to summarize their emails. Gmail now creates summaries automatically for complex threads, and they’ll appear above the emails themselves.

AI-powered summaries of emails have been found in Google Workspace accounts since last year, but until now you’ve had to manually trigger them. Instead, Google’s AI will now decide for itself when a summary might be helpful, generating them without asking for “longer email threads or messages with several replies.” Summaries of email threads will be kept up-to-date with new replies as they come in.

The automatic summaries will now appear above English-language emails, but only on mobile, and may take up to two weeks to appear for your account. Google hasn’t announced if or when the feature will expand to Gmail on desktop, or to Gmail users without paid Workspace accounts.

If Gmail doesn’t generate an AI summary automatically you’ll still be able to ask it to create one, much as you’ve been able to so far. And if you’d rather not see them at all, you can deactivate all of Gmail’s AI features by turning off “Smart features” in the app’s settings.