Overview

What started as a personal frustration with spending hours each week on repetitive email tasks turned into an exploration of AI agents and workflow automation. Time is money, and I was losing both to mundane inbox management – responding to straightforward questions, manually adding appointments to my calendar, and tracking receipts for expenses.

I decided to kill two birds with one stone: learn how to build intelligent AI agents while creating one that could handle these routine tasks and give me back a few precious hours each week. Enter Gia – my Google Inbox Assistant.

Role

Founder / Builder

Platform

Web Application

Deliverables

Product development, AI agent design, workflow automation, full-stack development

Execution

Problem

Email management consumes significant time through repetitive, automatable tasks that professionals handle manually every day. Simple confirmations, appointment scheduling, and expense tracking from receipts create an administrative burden that adds up to hours each week.

While email filters and basic automation exist, they lack the intelligence to understand context, make nuanced decisions, or take meaningful actions beyond sorting messages into folders.

Building the MVP

Product & Experience Design

Gia operates as an invisible assistant that monitors your Gmail and takes action when it detects specific scenarios. Rather than requiring manual triggers or complex setup, it watches for three core patterns:

  • Smart Draft Creation: When emails contain straightforward questions requiring simple responses, Gia creates draft replies that maintain your communication style
  • Appointment Processing: Automatically creates calendar events when it detects appointment confirmations from service providers
  • Expense Tracking: Extracts data from receipts and invoices, categorizes them intelligently, and logs everything in a Google Sheet

The experience centers around a clean web dashboard where users can monitor activity, review actions taken, and maintain control over their automated assistant.

Technical Implementation

Building Gia required orchestrating multiple AI and automation technologies into a seamless workflow:

AI & Decision Making:

  • OpenAI API for email analysis, draft generation, and expense categorization
  • Custom prompting for context-aware decision making across different email types
  • Structured JSON responses that enable reliable automation actions

Workflow Automation:

  • n8n as the central workflow engine, processing Gmail webhooks and coordinating actions
  • Google Cloud Pub/Sub for real-time email notifications and reliable message delivery
  • Stateful processing with deduplication to prevent duplicate actions

Google Ecosystem Integration:

  • Gmail API for reading emails, creating drafts, and managing webhooks
  • Google Calendar API for intelligent appointment scheduling with conflict detection
  • Google Sheets API for automated expense tracking and spreadsheet management
  • Google Drive API for file organization and permissions

Authentication & Dashboard:

  • Clerk for user authentication and secure token management
  • Next.js dashboard with real-time statistics and action monitoring
  • Encrypted storage of OAuth tokens with automatic refresh handling

The architecture processes emails in real-time, with webhooks triggering n8n workflows that analyze content, make intelligent decisions, and execute actions across Google services.

Outcomes

Building Gia in July 2025 successfully achieved both goals: mastering AI agent development while reclaiming valuable time from inbox management. The system now saves me several hours each week by automating routine email tasks that previously required manual attention.

The results exceeded expectations when friends and colleagues who learned about Gia requested access. What started as a personal productivity tool quickly grew into a solution that others in my network actively use and rely on for their own email automation.

Most importantly, Gia demonstrated that AI agents can seamlessly integrate into existing workflows without disrupting established communication patterns, proving that intelligent automation can enhance productivity while maintaining the personal touch that matters in professional relationships.

See it in action below!