Perplexity Email Assistant comes to Gmail and Outlook

Overwhelmed inboxes are getting a new A.I. triage nurse. Now Perplexity is releasing a product to help alleviate that message sprawl: Email Assistant, which runs in Gmail and Outlook and scans through sprawling threads so you can get a summary of what’s important (or not), prioritize things as needed, and even draft replies in your own voice — all of it designed to manage the deluge of messages flying past us daily that slows knowledge workers down.

What Email Assistant does inside your Gmail and Outlook inbox

Email Assistant hooks into your current desktop or mobile email app and starts by analyzing what messages are about, who’s sending them, and what you need to deal with first in your calendar. It can automatically label messages by type, consolidate long or related threads, and suggest meeting times based on your availability. Pose a natural-language question such as “When am I meeting with Dana next?” and it will scour your inbox to respond and provide a short follow-up.

The assistant is also trying to match your tone. Instead of puking up generic boilerplate, it drafts responses that mimic past phrasing and preferences, then gives you a brief step to OK on your end before sending anything. For heavy emailers, this “review and refine” workflow is the real productivity win: You get the gist and first draft in seconds, but you never cede control of that final send.

How it stacks up against Gemini and Copilot

For Perplexity, placement will push it directly against the incumbents closest to the inbox: Google’s Gemini in Gmail and Microsoft’s Copilot in Outlook. Gemini can already summarize threads, search your mailbox in plain language, and produce Smart Replies. Copilot has similar features in Outlook — such as catch-up summaries and tone-aware drafting for long threads.

The distinguishing factor here is the broadness and accessibility. Perplexity’s assistant is available both in Gmail and Outlook without a noticeable difference in the experience, which I appreciate for all the teams out there living in mixed environments. It also gravitates toward open-ended prompts — “What deserves my attention most?” — to help facilitate triage and prioritization, instead of making users click through several templates or rules. Features like a one-click bulk delete-for-all option by sender, which is available in some Gmail workflows, for example, are not called out in the initial list of Perplexity’s features.

Price, availability, and who should consider using it

There’s a catch: The Email Assistant is only available to subscribers to Perplexity’s Max plan, which, at $200 per month, can likely be ruled out for individuals and smaller companies. That puts it at the high end of the market, more expensive than Google’s Gemini add-ons for Workspace and Microsoft’s Copilot for Microsoft 365, which both may cost around $30 per user per month in enterprise plans, and far beyond consumer AI tiers at around $20 per month.

The pitch is straightforward: If a knowledge worker spends hours a week in email, just shaving 15 to 30 minutes each day can justify the premium. For years, McKinsey has reported the average time employees spend on reading and answering email during a workweek at about 28 percent, while Microsoft’s Work Trend Index posits that workers’ days are mostly filled with communication and coordination. For the jobs in which the inbox is the job — sales, client service, recruiting — ROI may pencil out quickly.

Security, compliance standards, and data handling policies

Perplexity says its Email Assistant is both SOC 2 and GDPR compliant, and it doesn’t train its models on user interactions. That’s table stakes for enterprise AI but bears emphasizing, since privacy reviews often dictate how fast a technology can be deployed. First, organizations should look for standard OAuth-based linking, transparent data retention controls, and easy revocation when a pilot ends. Like any AI in your inbox, admins are going to want access-audit logging and role-based access before doing a big rollout.

Why email is well-suited for automation at work

The volume problem is real. More than 360 billion emails are sent and received each day worldwide, according to the Radicati Group, and the number is expected to increase. AI’s advantage in this setting is not speed per se but compression. Getting a 40-message thread to conclude as a three-sentence brief, parsing out next steps, and aligning schedules without begetting more back-and-forth are the kind of micro-wins that add up across any given workweek.

The best assistants, critically, don’t eliminate judgment; rather, they lower the cost of exercising it. By surfacing out-of-the-ordinary anomalies, deadlines, and relationships (for example, “you talked about this contract with finance last month”), a tool like Email Assistant unburdens users from the noise so they can make faster, better decisions.

Early restrictions and what teams should watch closely

No assistant is perfect right out of the gate. Tone-matching can verge on the uncanny, and summarization can miss nuance or context, or attachments and side threads. Teams should see how it does with long-running conversations that involve multiple speakers and whether it obeys organization-specific etiquette. You’ll also want to look out for guardrails that circle sensitive content, especially if there are legal or compliance review processes in place before an email goes out the door.

Still, the thrust is clear: by turning up where people already breathe, Perplexity is wagering that it can convert casual AI usage to a daily habit. For overwhelmed people, an easy cue — “What deserves my attention first?” — might actually be the most useful button of all.