Worried about letting AI loose in your Gmail? You should be

Why in the world would you ever give ChatGPT access to your email? It’s a reasonable question, given everything we’re hearing about rogue AI agents, not to mention the privacy implications of unleashing AI in your inbox.

Then again, one of the best ways to appreciate the power of a personal AI assistant is to let it triage your unruly inbox, culling the spam and the marketing blasts while highlighting the messages that truly matter.

An agent with access to your messages can also give you a heads-up about impending meetings, warn you that your building’s elevator is out of service (that happened to me earlier this week), keep you current on that Jira ticket you filed, and perform other powerful workflows (like the one in this week’s prompt of the week, below).

To get access to your email, AI services like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Meta’s Muse agent need tools, and among the most common AI tools for email are those for Gmail. These tools allow AI models and agents to perform certain Gmail tasks, like “read message,” “add label,” “draft message,” or even — gulp — “send message.”

Welcome to another edition of Prompt Mode, your weekly AI newsletter.