The AI Summit Series is proud to feature an exclusive interview with Kyle Miller, General Manager of Yahoo Mail, who reveals how their innovative catch up feature is transforming personal email through AI-powered solutions. Discover how Yahoo Mail is reimagining email for the modern user with game-like experiences that make inbox management less of a chore and more of a delight.

In this interview, Miller shares insights on Yahoo Mail's strategic focus on personal rather than enterprise email, their success with younger demographics, and how AI works "quietly in the background" to create a second brain for users.

Don't miss this fascinating exploration of how AI is revolutionizing one of our most fundamental digital tools, offering valuable lessons for organizations looking to enhance user experiences through thoughtful AI integration.

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The AI Summit Series: Yahoo Mail has recently positioned itself as building "the best personal email experience." What led to this strategic focus on personal email rather than enterprise solutions?

Kyle Miller (KM): We know that people use their personal email regularly - even checking it multiple times per day - and that we use our personal email very differently than we use our work email.  However, most email services are built as enterprise solutions that people use for their personal inbox by default.  We see a huge opportunity to reimagine what personal email can be, moving beyond the basic send-and-receive functionality to create something that actually helps people be more efficient and better manage their personal lives.

The AI Summit Series: Your recent data shows nearly half of Yahoo Mail users are Gen Z or Millennials. How has this demographic shift influenced your product development strategy?

KM: Today there are more ways to communicate across more platforms than ever before – text messages, social media, DMs, and more.  But people, particularly Gen Z and Millennials, still rely on email in their personal lives. This demographic is mobile-first, and are used to apps that are simple and enjoyable to use. We’re building features in Yahoo Mail that are built for how people use email today – simplified, mobile-first, with some game-like experiences to make the chore of email easier for our users.

The AI Summit Series: The new catch up feature seems to acknowledge that email can feel like work. How did you identify this pain point, and what made you decide to address it with a game-like experience?

KM: We know that many people - ourselves included! - feel like managing email felt like another task on their to-do list.  We are purposefully evolving Yahoo Mail to look, feel, and function differently than how email has worked for decades. 

The game-like experience in our catch up feature was intentional. We wanted to make inbox cleanup quick and satisfying rather than stressful. Users get an AI-powered summary of their messages and simple 'delete' or 'keep' options, then see a celebratory reward screen showing how many emails they sorted in seconds.

This is exactly the kind of simplified, mobile-first, AI-powered feature that reflects how people actually want to use email for their personal lives. An inbox full of unread emails might feel overwhelming – we’re enabling our users with a tool to tackle this, helping them focus, make a series of quick decisions, and triage and organize those messages. 

The AI Summit Series: Could you walk us through how the catch up feature works and specifically how AI powers the email summaries that users see?

KM: The catch up feature is unique to Yahoo Mail, designed and built to enable our users to quickly and easily go through unread emails, and we’re the only email service to offer this type of feature. We’re utilizing AI to create a summary of the contents of the unread email so users can review quickly and decide what action they’d like to take.  

The AI Summit Series: What technical challenges did your team face in developing AI that could accurately summarize the wide variety of emails people receive in their personal inboxes?

KM: We’ve prioritized including AI summaries for emails where they are most useful to the user to be able to see a summary of the contents of a message, primarily focusing on emails from individuals.  Some technical challenges we navigated were around how we parse out action items from an email – creating a summary is fairly simple, but understanding the expectations of our users takes a lot more nuance. For example, an email signature from a brand could say "Follow us on Instagram" - but that isn't a critical action item that is in the email itself. Those nuances are important but also challenging.

The AI Summit Series: Yahoo Mail emphasizes "AI-powered features that work quietly in the background." How does this philosophy of ambient AI apply to the catch up feature?

KM: Often, email subject lines and previews don’t really tell the story about what’s inside the email itself.  Overall, that’s a pain point we’re trying to solve for - we’re aiming to remove this guess work for our users, and one example of how we’re putting this into action is with AI-powered summaries of message content in the catch up feature. 

The AI Summit Series: Your team describes Yahoo Mail's AI as creating a "second brain" for users. How do you balance making the AI helpful without being intrusive or overwhelming?

KM: Our philosophy is that people want fewer decisions to make, and the best AI feels invisible. We want to inject AI into our product where and when it solves a real, universal pain point for users.  

The AI Summit Series: How do you measure success with features like catch up? What metrics or user feedback are you looking for to validate your approach?

KM: We are looking at how users are engaging with the feature. We’re looking at the accuracy of the summaries provided, if we’re pulling all the right details people need to make a quick decision to sort through their unread messages. 

The AI Summit Series: Your data shows that nearly 70% of Gen Z and Millennials check their personal email multiple times daily, yet almost half have missed important events due to disorganization. How did these insights shape the development of catch up?

KM: We know - from listening to our users and from our own personal experiences - how quickly a personal inbox can get overwhelming and disorganized, and cause us all to miss important information.  We’ve introduced several features to make the inbox function for how people use email in their personal lives, and make it a bit easier and more enjoyable. The catch up feature is one example, as well as several other features including the ability for users to take quick actions  – to add an event to their calendar, view a schedule, RSVP to an event and more – right from their inbox, and the Priority inbox tab, which automatically highlights a user’s most important messages first, along with AI-generated, one-line summaries of the message, and we’re planning to roll out additional features in coming months. 

The AI Summit Series: The "Anti Email Email Club" collaboration with Anti Social Social Club is an interesting marketing approach. How does this partnership reflect your understanding of younger users' relationship with email?

KM: We were excited to partner with Anti Social Social Club - it’s such an iconic global brand, and we’ve long been fans of their collabs with some of the world’s top brands including Nike, Hello Kitty, Coca-Cola,  Formula 1, and others.  We aligned around the idea of the “Anti Email Email Club”, because, really no matter what age you are, there is a universal feeling that we’re all ‘anti email’ when it feels like work. 

The AI Summit Series: Looking at the broader AI landscape we discuss at The AI Summit Series, how do you see personal email evolving over the next 3-5 years as AI capabilities continue to advance?

KM: We envision Yahoo Mail continuing to evolve, adding more and more smart tools that act as a connector between messages and actions, learning and anticipating and becoming more personalized for each user. 

The AI Summit Series: Many AI implementations require users to learn new skills or take extra steps. Your approach emphasizes features that "don't require users to learn a new skill." Why is this distinction important in your AI strategy?

KM: Our product philosophy is to make Yahoo Mail a simple, easy, enjoyable experience.  Our AI strategy is an extension of that mission - we want AI to work in the background of Yahoo Mail as assistive infrastructure, not a feature tacked on to create additional steps and more work for our users. 

The AI Summit Series: As AI becomes more integrated into communication tools, what responsibility do you feel providers like Yahoo Mail have in shaping how people interact with technology in their daily lives?

KM: Email is a tool we all use every day in our personal lives, but hasn’t seen much innovation in the past two decades.  We are integrating AI throughout the Yahoo Mail experience to create experiences where intelligent systems act on behalf of the user, and help bolster productivity, while maintaining a human-centric design. 

The AI Summit Series: With AI-powered features analyzing email content to create summaries, how do you address potential privacy concerns from users?

KM: At Yahoo, we want our users to continue to have a great experience with our products, knowing that their privacy is protected. Our commitment is to put the people who use our products first – to protect their privacy and security, to be transparent, and to provide them with easy-to-use controls for managing their information. 

The AI Summit Series: The catch up" feature is exclusively available on mobile. How does the mobile-first approach influence your AI implementation strategy compared to desktop experiences? 

KM: We are focused on evolving both our mobile and desktop experiences, and know that our users continue to use both.  Over the past year we’ve been rolling out a completely redesigned desktop experience with AI-features built in, including AI-generated summaries of messages, along with AI-generated suggestions for proposed responses, actions or tasks. 

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