Before My First Bevi
There’s a specific kind of morning chaos that happens between waking up and actually being useful. Mine used to involve scrolling through email half awake, missing the important stuff, and finding it later in the worst possible way (looking at you, overdue heartworm medication). A few weeks ago, I started letting a Google agent handle that first pass instead. Now, before I’ve even filled my bottle at our Bevi machine, it’s already read my inbox and told me what matters.
The tool is Google Labs’ cc, and it’s quietly become one of the more useful things I’ve added to my routine in a while. Not because it’s flashy. Because it’s boring in exactly the right way.
It Doesn’t Just Summarize, It Triages
Most AI email tools I’ve tried do the same trick (read about my AI Chief of Staff experiment): condense a hundred emails into a paragraph. Fine, but not that helpful. What makes Google’s cc agent different is that it doesn’t just tell you what happened. It tells you what needs to happen.
In a few weeks, it’s caught a subscription trial about to convert to a paid plan, a price increase buried three paragraphs into an email I would have skimmed and archived, and order confirmations that should have gone on my calendar but never would have on their own. None of these are urgent in the moment. All of them turn into a headache later if nobody notices.
That’s the part that got my attention. It’s not predicting the future. It’s just reading carefully, which apparently is rare enough to feel like magic.
The Weird, Wonderful Edge Cases
Every new tool needs a few oddball moments to earn your trust, and cc delivered. One morning it scanned an old to-do list, found the entry “sing to neighbor,” and helpfully suggested “Eye of the Tiger” as a fitting choice.
I have so many questions. Who was I singing to. Why was this a task. Was it going well before I apparently needed a hype song. Google’s cc didn’t ask any of that. It just offered a suggestion and moved on, which honestly might be the most respectful response available.
The Caveats Nobody Skips
I’m not going to pretend this is a flawless system, because it isn’t. cc is experimental. It can misfire, misread context, or flag something as urgent that really isn’t. Right now it only works with personal Gmail, no Workspace integration yet, so this isn’t showing up in your work inbox anytime soon.
There’s also the obvious tradeoff: you’re handing an AI agent access to your inbox and your calendar. That’s not nothing. It’s worth deciding, deliberately, whether that access is worth the convenience, rather than clicking “allow” on autopilot the way most of us do with everything else.
What I Actually Want From This
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. The value here isn’t that AI did something extraordinary. It’s that it did something extraordinarily boring, consistently, before I had to think about it.
If this ever makes its way into Google Workspace, I’m first in line. Picture starting your workday already knowing what needs your attention, what you promised someone, what’s about to become a problem, and what to prep for before your next meeting. Not a summary. A briefing.
Maybe that’s the actual future of AI agents, at least the useful kind. Not writing your novel or planning your vacation. Just quietly making sure the dog gets her medication on time.
