Artificial Intelligence in Your Inbox with Knowmail

The CEO of Knowmail, Haim Senior, tells us how they are using AI to enhance your email inbox

3
Collaboration

Published: August 13, 2018

Ian Taylor Editor

Ian Taylor

Editor

When you think of innovative technology start-up businesses you might think of Silicon Valley in California, and Israel probably isn’t the first place that comes to mind. Today we look at one Israeli start up, Knowmail, whose innovative optimisation of email might be coming to your inbox sooner than you think.

Knowmail CEO Haim Senior
Haim Senior, Knowmail

Founded in 2014, Knowmail have an innovative approach to the improving efficiency and productivity of email provision. The application which integrates with Microsoft Outlook appears as an icon on the task bar but the real magic is occurring behind the scenes. Knowmail uses a sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) to scan your inbox learning more about your email usage, how you prioritise your communications, and how you manage your time.

Then the system can help you to optimise your time by managing your emails according to your historical usage patterns, freeing you up from the general distractions and white noise to concentrate on the really important stuff.

UC Today spoke to Haim Senior, CEO of Knowmail, about why he and his two business partners quit lucrative technology jobs and gambled it all to found a tech start-up enhancing inboxes.

“My constant battle was to stay on top. I was a busy man, I had two work phones, managed a team of people across multiple countries and time zones, so I sacrificed a lot with my family. I missed meals and broke up family time all to catch-up with my inbox, to make sure I was on top of my game.”

Email efficiency has been a long-established issue. The distraction of new emails appearing, regardless of their importance, is undoubtedly an issue with the platform. With the onset of mobile, the premise of ‘always on’ or ‘always online’ takes a toll on anyone working, but Haim realised the process wasn’t efficient and could provide a dramatically better experience for him.

“In my career I have encountered some really beautiful technology, the ability to predict what people are going to do next, either with video, chat, messages or emails. We came up with an idea to open up Knowmail and use these technologies to solve these problems.”

Haim and his two co-founders realised that their time management and work life balance issues were not isolated to them, and the solution and efficiency improvements in Outlook could have relevance around the world. The development of Knowmail was not an easy one. Many others have tried and failed to improve email experience but after four years of dedication the platform now can yield great results. Don’t take our word for it, endorsement from Microsoft and integration with Cortana show that they can provide a real value add to Microsoft’s email provision.

Outlook Knowmail
Knowmail, available in Outlook and on mobile

“Removing the stress and the manual administration from email was the main goal. We didn’t look for KPIs that would help employees reduce time wasted or achieve better efficiency, we wanted them to become more successful and that is how we strategize everything about Knowmail. People produce more when they are happy and that’s what our target was.”

Knowmail’s predictive capacity can enable a number of new features to further enhance your inbox performance. An enhanced searching feature, options to defer emails and instantly shift them out to the predicted folder of choice can all reduce your wasted email admin time and generally improve the experience.

“For us the big goal was not to make money, the big goal was truly to solve the problem. Once we had seen that it works, and it works for tens of thousands of users we realised we had to find a way to put this into a business model.”

Available across platforms, you can realise the power of Knowmail with its Outlook enhancement, applications for mobile on iOS and Android as well as within Cortana across different devices and platforms. Their growth and future targets and not limited in anyway.

“We are talking to all the big operating system producers to try and become a ubiquitous product within the industry.”

You can try Knowmail for free, we have at UC Today and it certainly has improved our email experience, we are looking forward to even more features and functions to improve our Outlook experience, so we can write more about exciting products like this.

Artificial Intelligence
Featured

Share This Post