- Anyone who gets a lot of email and wants AI to sort it before they even open Gmail.
- Freelancers and small business owners who deal with invoices, client inquiries, and vendor emails that all need different handling.
- Ops and finance teams who want invoice details extracted into a spreadsheet automatically.
Guides Google
Automate Your Gmail with Google Workspace Studio (Free Tool)
In this guide, you will learn how to use Google Workspace Studio to automate your Gmail inbox.
Introduction
In this guide, you will learn how to use Google Workspace Studio to automate your Gmail inbox. You will set up agents that triage incoming messages, extract key information from invoices, and draft replies using Gemini, without connecting third-party tools.
Workspace Studio cannot send emails on your behalf to other people. It can draft replies to anyone, but you have to manually send them.
Step-by-step 4 steps
Instructions
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Step 1 of 4 Check out the pre-made email boosters
Go to studio.workspace.google.com. Before you build anything custom, look at the email boosters on the homepage. These are one-click templates Google has prebuilt:
- Daily email recap that summarizes your inbox. It sends via Google Chat by default, but you can change it to email.
- VIP notifications that ping you when you get emails from important people.
- Auto-label and star for follow-up emails.
These are a good way to get familiar with what Workspace Studio can do. Turn a couple on and see how they work before building your own flow.
Pro tip: The VIP notification booster is useful out of the box, but you can take it further. Create a Google Sheet with a list of your VIP contacts, such as clients, teammates, or your boss, and reference it in a custom flow. That way, you update the sheet instead of editing the flow every time.
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Step 2 of 4 Build your auto-labeling flow
Click the plus button to create a new flow. Select “When I get an email” as your starter and set it to check all emails.
Add an Add labels step. Toggle on AI-powered labels. You will see a list of categories like “Receipts & Invoices,” “Newsletters,” “Social,” and more. Select the labels you care about.
- You can edit each AI-powered label to tell Gemini exactly what to look for. Click into a label and describe what should qualify.
- Only select labels you actually want to act on. You do not need to label everything, and fewer labels means fewer AI runs against your daily limit.
Hit Turn on, name your flow, and send yourself a test email to make sure it fires. Check the Activity tab in Workspace Studio to see exactly what happened at each step.
Pro tip: It can take a few minutes for a flow to fire after a new email arrives. Be patient. In testing, it took about 5 minutes at most.
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Step 3 of 4 Add an invoice extraction step optional
You can use Gemini to extract information from your emails. This example walks through an agent flow that extracts invoice details.
Create a flow like before. This time, create an AI label for invoices and only check the box for that label.
Add a Check if step after the labeling step. Set it to run when the “Receipts & Invoices” label, or whatever label you chose, was added.
Inside that conditional block:
- Add an Extract step. This tells Gemini to read the email and pull out specific fields. For invoices, extract the invoice amount, sender, and due date.
- Add a Sheets > Add a row step. Select a Google Sheet you have set up for tracking, then map each extracted field to a column using the variables from the Extract step.
Now, every time an invoice lands in your inbox, Gemini labels it, extracts the key details, and logs them in your spreadsheet automatically.
- If a step runs outside the Check if box, it runs regardless of whether the condition was true or false. Make sure your Extract and Sheets steps are inside the box.
- You can add steps in the “If false” branch too. For example, update a row in your sheet to mark non-invoice emails as “Skipped.”
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Step 4 of 4 Draft replies with Gemini optional
You can also have Gemini draft email replies as part of any flow. Add an Ask Gemini step and use the variables tool to feed it the email content from a previous step. Use a prompt like:
Read this email and draft a professional reply acknowledging receipt and confirming we'll follow up within 24 hours.Then add a Draft a reply step and pull in Gemini’s response using variables. The draft will show up in your Gmail drafts folder. Review it and hit send.
Pro tip: Workspace Studio cannot send emails on your behalf to other people. It can only send emails to you, such as notifications. It can draft replies to anyone, but you have to manually send them.
Another pro tip: Workspace Studio limits are unclear at the moment. If you want to stay under the flow limits, use non-AI flows for simple tasks like keyword filters or sender-based labels, and save AI-powered steps for emails that actually need Gemini to read and interpret them.
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Overview Back to the steps
Background and context
Who This Is Useful For
What You Will Build
You will build a Gmail automation that uses Gemini to label incoming emails by category, such as invoices, newsletters, and client messages, as they arrive. You can also layer on optional steps that extract specific details from labeled emails into a Google Sheet and draft replies.
- AI-powered Gmail labels for incoming email categories.
- Optional invoice detail extraction into a Google Sheet.
- Optional Gemini-drafted replies that appear in Gmail drafts for review.
What You Need
- A Google Workspace account with access to Workspace Studio.
- A Google Sheet, optional, for logging extracted data.
Going Further
- Build a full triage system with multiple flows and custom AI-powered labels for the categories that matter to you, such as clients, internal messages, invoices, newsletters, or job applications.
- Connect to Google Sheets for reporting beyond invoice tracking, including client inquiry details, support request summaries, and vendor quotes.
- Pair this with the Google Workspace Studio form flow if you already set it up, so Forms handle inbound requests and Gmail handles inbound email.