The Wired posted that in September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company whose name once stood forinternetThe vigorous enterprising spirit that has degenerated over the years into a joke of aYahoo, Internet portal.
Some believe Lanzone has zero chance of success. Forbes contributor George Blatt wrote, "It's hard to believe there's anyone else on the planet who would want to take over this position from him." But Lanzone saw things differently. In his view, Yahoo was an unrecognized gem.He said, "If you could take the name Yahoo off the company and look at the state of the business in 2021, you'd see it has billions of dollars in revenue."
Instead of crying over lost glory in search, Lanzone is focused on improving Yahoo's existing business. He said, "We don't have to worry about what we're not." He eliminated some money-losing divisions, such as some underperforming ad tech units, and quietly made some acquisitions to bolster some quality businesses. Lanzone has improved the company's profits and expanded its user base, and he calls Yahoo the fastest recovering of the companies Apollo has acquired.
Market research firm Comusco, which measures Web site traffic, ranked Yahoo No. 1 in news, No. 1 in finance and No. 3 in sports.Yahoo is second only to Google Mail (Gmail) when it comes to email services. He said that hundreds of millions of people use Yahoo every month in the United States alone.
A year after Lanzone took over Yahoo, the emergence of ChatGPT revolutionized the entire tech world. In the previous technological changes in search, social and mobile, Yahoo had missed these opportunities perfectly in almost every case. Lanzone said Yahoo won't develop its own language model or invest $100 billion in data centers, but he believes the company will still seize the opportunity. He said, "I'm tempted to automate the term 'artificial intelligence' so I don't have to keep saying it." Yahoo has in-house AI specialized talent and will leverage AI technology from outside companies. For example, it has partnered with startup Sierra to use robo-customer service.
One of Ranzone's smartest AI moves was the acquisition of Artifact, an AI-powered news aggregator developed by the co-founder of Instagram.When Artifact was unable to continue and announced its closure, Lanzone was one of many buyers vying for its underlying technology. Earlier this year, Artifact became the centerpiece of Yahoo's relaunched homepage. Instead of incorporating their technology into our product, we did the opposite," Lanzone said. In fact, Yahoo News is now Artifact."
Next up for an AI-driven makeover is Yahoo Finance, the leading consumer investment tool and arguably Yahoo's crown jewel. Lanzone said he's already made some progress with product optimization. He said Yahoo is no longer trying to compete with CNBC in financial news and is focusing more on data. But bigger changes are in the works. He said, "You're going to make more money and you're going to save more money, and we're going to use artificial intelligence to do that for you."
