Free email pioneer Yahoo has clever play to retake crown from Gmail
Although no longer the account du jour, Yahoo — the pioneer of free mass-market email — is putting itself at the forefront of implementing AI features to lure in younger users.
Yahoo has launched 'Catch Up' designed to help users speed-read and sort their emails with minimal effort.
Yahoo says it's part of the biggest upgrade to its email system in a decade, as it aims to win over a new generation of users who believe in working smarter, not harder
Gen Z and millennials are one of Yahoo's fastest-growing demographics and already make up half of its Mail users.
The new gamified tool will allow users to see a preview and summary before being given the option to 'delete' or 'keep in inbox'.
Although Yahoo was first in the game, Gmail soon began poaching its users with a more user-friendly interface.
The company lost even more customers after a massive data breach in 2013 exposed around 3 billion of its users information.
'People have been writing off or predicting the death of email for years,' Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone told Bloomberg.
'But it has an incredibly consistent role in people's lives, both at home and work.'
Lanzone, who was brought in to restructure the company in 2021, believed AI will be '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.'
Lanzone told the publication that Yahoo is also 'vintage', something that will help it stand the test of time.
'We're just getting started because we believe there's a lot of innovation that can be done.
'There is so much more on our roadmap,' he added.
Dario Amodei, CEO of leading AI company Anthropic, has warned of mass unemployment
The relentless march of AI continues to thrill investors and unnerve others.
Dario Amodei, CEO of leading AI company Anthropic recently warned the technology could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.
The billionaire said AI could also soon raise unemployment to 10 to 20 percent.
He said the government and AI companies should stop 'sugar-coating' the job apocalypse on the horizon.
Meanwhile, the FBI is warning Gmail users about a dangerous ransomware scheme that could hold your private data hostage.
Medusa ransomware group has already victimized over 300 targets using phishing scams to exploit unprotected software in the users' digital devices.
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