Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Email Assistant can help you review, organize, and draft emails.
- It’s available to paid subscribers of Perplexity Max.
- AI companies are marketing heavily to enterprise customers.
Perplexity is bringing its AI directly to white-collar workers’ inboxes with an automated assistant that can review and organize emails, and respond to messages in an approximation of their human users’ voices.
What Email Assistant can do
Email Assistant, released Monday, connects directly with Gmail or Outlook via a user’s desktop or mobile email app to perform a wide range of monotonous tasks, like suggesting meeting times based on calendar availability and generating summaries of disparate but related message threads. This mirrors a feature within Comet — Perplexity’s AI agent-powered web browser designed to compete with Chrome and other legacy browsers — which can summarize content found on a particular web page.
Also: I tried Perplexity’s Comet AI browser, and I like where it’s going (but it’s not there yet)
It can also auto-label messages by type, tell you when your next meeting is with a coworker by searching your inbox, and order priorities.
Email Assistant joins a growing list of pricier AI tools, including ChatGPT Pro, aimed at professionals on enterprise budgets. Its capabilities look similar to some of Gemini’s in Gmail, including Personalized Smart Replies, finding information via a natural-language search, and organizing priorities. Gemini can also help users declutter their inboxes with a single command to delete emails from a specific sender, though Perplexity’s assistant doesn’t list that as a feature. Though Google has yet to release a formal email assistant beyond Gemini, it did recently release one for Google Meet.
Of course, Gemini is only available for Gmail. Outlook, on the other hand, has its own Copilot features, courtesy of Microsoft’s equivalent AI assistant, which feature many of the same capabilities, primarily summarizing threads and drafting replies.
Also: 7 Copilot tricks to supercharge your classic Outlook – even if they’re not for me
Email Assistant is SOC 2- and GDPR-compliant and is not trained on user interactions, according to Perplexity.
Available exclusively through Perplexity’s $200/month Max subscription tier, the launch of the new Email Assistant is the AI startup’s latest effort to capture a slice of the workplace productivity market — a niche that’s become a central marketing focus throughout the AI industry.
Selling AI to businesses
To many, generative AI is still largely a solution in search of a problem. Regardless, tech companies have increasingly been turning their attention towards enterprises in the hopes that their AI tools will become deeply interwoven into the workplace as productivity essentials.
Also: Is ChatGPT Plus still worth $20 when the free version offers so much – including GPT-5?
Microsoft is now partnering with Anthropic to incorporate the AI startup’s technology into workplace productivity platforms like Excel and Word. OpenAI, meanwhile, is reportedly building a platform to compete with Google Workplace and Microsoft Office 365, as it simultaneously distances itself from its long-standing partnership with Microsoft and restructures itself as a Public Benefit Corporation.
Companies have also been pushing their AI systems into tools that are already deeply entrenched in individuals’ daily workflows, a kind of marketing sleight-of-hand executed in the hopes that the use of those new tools will also become habitual and indispensable. Last week, for example, Google made Gemini available in Chrome through a dedicated widget at the top-right corner of a web page (the feature was previously available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers).
Also: I got 4 years of product development done in 4 days for $200, and I’m still stunned
Similarly, Perplexity is betting that by weaving its new Email Assistant directly into white-collar workers’ inboxes, it can become a go-to AI solution for enterprises while ratcheting up its competition with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other competitors.
How to try it
If you’re a Perplexity Max subscriber, you can visit this page to connect your Outlook or Gmail account to Perplexity’s Email Assistant. Perplexity recommends starting with a simple prompt, like, “What needs my attention first?” in order to start exploring the assistant’s capabilities.