AI Email Assistants & AI Inbox Tools cover a growing set of features that help people and teams manage email volume, draft messages, extract action items, and automate routine inbox tasks. By early 2026, the category includes in-client assistants (Outlook AI, Superhuman’s built-in features), platform-level copilots (Microsoft 365 Copilot), and model providers and APIs (Google’s Gemini family, Anthropic’s Claude, Cohere) that power writing, summarization, retrieval, and compliance-aware deployments. These tools serve several roles: email writing assistants generate or rewrite messages and translations (DeepL, Gemini, Claude); inbox assistants summarize threads, triage priority, and surface follow-ups (Outlook AI, Microsoft 365 Copilot); personal AI assistants and scheduling helpers manage calendar tasks and meeting coordination (Sidekick AI); and workspace integrations embed email context into notes and automations (Notion). Enterprise-focused providers (Cohere, Google Cloud Vertex AI) add private models, embeddings, and retrieval to support secure search and data control. Key trends shaping the space include stronger in-app integrations that reduce context switching, multimodal models enabling richer context-aware replies, retrieval-augmented generation for up-to-date, tenant-specific knowledge, and growing focus on privacy, compliance, and admin controls for enterprises. Practical considerations for adoption include accuracy and hallucination risk, data governance, localization/translation quality, and workflow automation capabilities. Overall, AI inbox tools are shifting from experimental assistants to operational features embedded across email and collaboration stacks—helping users draft, summarize, translate, schedule, and automate while raising new questions about trust, control, and governance.