Since stepping into his role as vice president of product for Gmail in January 2025, Blake Barnes has been tasked with shepherding one of the internet’s most beloved platforms into the generative AI revolution.
His overarching vision, he told Fortune in a recent interview, is to bring Gmail into the “Gemini era,” transforming it into a “personal and proactive inbox assistant” for its 3 billion global users. To this end, Gmail launched a suite of AI-powered updates this January, including AI overviews in Gmail Search, where you can “ask your inbox anything.” It also introduced a feature where AI drafts a reply based on context, and a user decides whether to send, edit, or ignore. The catch, Barnes explained, is that when it comes to having the ideal email assistant, “everyone has a different version of what that means to them.”
3 types of AI adopters
Google has learned a few things about AI adoption and its billions of users, though. First, there are the “cutting-edge AI adopters,” who are eager to explore radical new ways of working and “willing to take a fair amount of risk” for novel experiences.
Second, there is a large cohort of cautious learners, people who “aren’t sure what they’d like the relationship to be with AI.” They want to slowly understand how the technology aligns with their personal values, principles, and life goals. “They’d like to learn a bit more about what it means and what it is and what it’s not,” he said. After all, it’s early days in AI adoption, so this approach makes a lot of sense.
Finally, there are the pragmatic, everyday users, who don’t want to configure anything complicated or learn a new workflow; they simply want “useful AI solving a specific problem for them” without needing to push the envelope.
Don’t judge my inbox
Serving such a diverse audience with radically different comfort levels requires a delicate balance, Barnes explained. He noted that many users feel immense pressure and even embarrassment from modern information overload. “Like they see that number tick up in their inbox, and it feels like this like pressure pushing down on them. Sometimes they even feel embarrassed, right?” Barnes said there’s a “don’t judge me” that he’s heard from someone with, say, 4,000 unread emails.
“What we hear a lot is [that] people feel sort of inundated with the amount of information that they receive,” Barnes said. “And it comes in different flavors. Some people feel it in their personal lives, some people feel it more at work.” It can take difference shapes and forms, but he said “it almost feels sort of like the weight of information is just heavy.”
The trust factor
Barnes offered Google’s new “AI Inbox” as a bet on cleaning up all this clutter, acknowledging the problem was the “furthest out there” in terms of difficulty and execution. He responded to Fortune‘s questions about the viral news stories of AI agents accidentally deleting an entire inbox, saying these were a cautionary tale. He stressed that at Google recognizes how much trust people place in Gmail and what a genuine risk the power of AI tools represents. “We anchor a lot on trust … and that trust is earned over many, many experiences in many, many years, but it can be lost very quickly.”
“I think trust is going to be just as important in this new AI evolution era than it has been before and likely more important than ever,” Barnes noted, adding that Google spends a lot of time to make sure everything is built off the inbox and stays accurate. Behind the scenes, Blake said, Google relies heavily on “evals” (evaluation sets) created by technologists to relentlessly test AI outputs against a wide range of inputs, ensuring the generated content remains strictly grounded in factual data. For features like AI overviews, the system provides exact citations so users can independently verify the original source.
Furthermore, Barnes described a careful “progression” for how AI will eventually be allowed to take action on a user’s behalf. Currently, features like suggested replies allow the user to remain the “ultimate arbiter” of what gets sent. As the AI models improve, the platform will incrementally move toward suggesting actions for user approval, before eventually offering a fully autopilot option where users might say, “hey, for emails like this, send this email automatically”.
Ultimately, the goal is to recreate the magic and novelty of Gmail’s original days when you had to be invited to this new email service. He wants to offer an assistant that has your back and helps you manage your life, not just your messages. But Barnes made it clear that surrendering control to an AI assistant will always remain a choice. Features like connecting personal intelligence to the Gemini app are “totally opt-in,” ensuring that cautious learners and everyday pragmatists only adopt the technology when they are completely ready.
“We’ll work our way there in a way that we feel like is… in line with that sort of obligation we’ve made and commitment we’ve made to users’ trust,” Barnes said.
