Yahoo Adds New AI Features to Mail App in Attempt to Up Usage

Yahoo is rolling out new artificial intelligence features for its email platform in an effort to better engage one of its fast-growing subset of users: Gen Z and millennials.

The company on Thursday said it's bringing AI features to its Mail service aimed at simplification. A new gamified “Catch Up” feature will provide AI-powered summaries and email previews to give users the option to “delete” or “keep in inbox.” The feature is the first in a series of changes marking the biggest upgrade the Mail app has seen in a decade.

Over the years, the company has struggled to innovate as competing platforms like Gmail provided an easier-to-use interface. The company also suffered a high-profile security breach in 2013 that the company later estimated to have exposed all three billion of its users, dealing a blow to user trust. 

Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Jim Lanzone, who joined in 2021 to restructure the company, said in an interview “there's no doubt” Mail remains one of its core products. “People have been writing off or predicting the death of email for years,” he said. “But it has an incredibly consistent role in people's lives, both at home and work.”

He said nearly half of current Yahoo Mail users are Gen Z or millennials and that one in three Americans currently use the service. Lanzone said AI will also play a big role in the future of Yahoo, calling the technology “incredibly important to almost every product that we operate.” 

“We just want AI working quietly in the background to simplify tasks across all the products that we operate from search to mail to finance to news,” he said. “We don't want to ask people to have to engage or take an extra step or learn a new behavior.”

He also calls the brand “vintage,” meaning he believes it will stick around. “We're just getting started because we believe there's a lot of innovation that can be done,” Lanzone said. “There is so much more on our roadmap.”

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