The Prince Academy株式会社 | Step-by-Step Guide: Building a Workflow to Automatically Summarize New Emails | Leveraging AI: How to Summarize Emails and Categorize Data for Your Workflow | First Steps with Google Workspace Studio: AI Workflow Development Course Connecting Gmail, Calendar and Spreadsheets

Having grounded ourselves in the fundamentals of Google Apps Script and the core services like GmailApp and SpreadsheetApp, it's time to move from theory to a powerful, practical application. The previous section provided the tools; this section provides the project. We're about to build something that tackles one of the most common productivity drains in the modern workplace: the overwhelming influx of email.

Imagine your inbox is constantly filling up with newsletters, project updates, customer inquiries, and automated reports. Sifting through them to find the critical information is a job in itself. What if you could have an assistant that reads each new email for you, writes a one-sentence summary, and neatly organizes it in a spreadsheet for a quick scan? That's precisely what we are going to build in this guide.

This step-by-step tutorial will walk you through creating a fully automated workflow that connects Gmail, Google's AI, and Google Sheets. By the end, you'll have a working script that monitors your inbox, summarizes new emails, and logs the results, turning your chaotic inbox into a structured, at-a-glance dashboard.

graph TD
    A[New Email Arrives in Gmail] --> B{Apps Script Trigger Fires};
    B --> C[Script Fetches Email Content];
    C --> D[Sends Content to AI Model];
    D --> E[Receives Concise Summary];
    E --> F[Writes Summary to Google Sheet];

Our workflow follows a clear and logical path. Let's break down the construction into manageable steps, starting with setting up our destination.

Step 1: Prepare Your Google Sheet

Before we write any code, we need a place to store our summaries. Create a new Google Sheet. Rename it to something memorable, like "AI Email Summary Log." In the first row, create the headers for our data. A good starting point is:

A1: Timestamp
B1: From
C1: Subject
D1: Summary
E1: Link to Email

This simple structure gives us all the key information we need. We can see when the summary was logged, who sent the email, what the subject was, the AI-generated summary, and a direct link to the original message if we need more context.

Step 2: Open the Apps Script Editor

With your Google Sheet open, navigate to Extensions > Apps Script. This will open a new tab with the script editor, bound directly to your spreadsheet. This is where we will write the code to orchestrate our workflow. Delete any boilerplate code in the Code.gs file so you have a blank slate.

graph TD A[New Email Arrives in Gmail] --> B{Apps Script Trigger Fires}; B --> C[Script Fetches Email Content]; C --> D[Sends Content to AI Model]; D --> E[Receives Concise Summary]; E --> F[Writes Summary to Google Sheet];