AI everywhere: the overwhelming redundancy of CC’s on-demand abilities and the same sorts of suggestions from Gemini all throughout Gmail — and beyond.
JR Raphael / Foundry
On a related note, just this month, Google previewed a new AI-in-Gmail function called AI Inbox — which relies on, yes, AI to organize your emails and offer up at-a-glance summaries of your (allegedly) most pressing messages and the tasks within ’em. It doesn’t incorporate info from Calendar and Drive, like CC does, nor does it have the more on-demand elements that CC pulls into the equation. But it feels kind of like where CC might ultimately be headed, if and when the two converge.
Still, it’s important to remember that CC is an “early Labs experiment,” so some of these rough edges and awkward juxtapositions are probably to be expected. As of now, we don’t even know if or when it’ll graduate into a full-fledged, widely available feature or anything that’s offered on the more company-centric Google Workspace side of the spectrum.
For the moment, CC presents a potpourri of potential that feels equal parts promising and problematic. The big question is how it’ll evolve and what it’ll look like in its final form (assuming, of course, that it doesn’t get brushed aside and abandoned somewhere along the way). That’s the question that’ll determine if CC ends up being a place where this type of artificial intelligence feels appropriate and advantageous or just another area where it’s being forced onto us with questionable practical value.
