AI Usage Surges During New Year Holidays For Greetings And Planning

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

From December 30, 2024, to January 12, 2025, Mail.ru and Cloud users increasingly relied on artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their holiday experiences and plan for the future, according to research by Mail analysts.

The most common request was for AI-generated New Year’s greetings. Writing job application texts ranked second, followed by creative birthday greetings for loved ones.

Popular Uses Of AI Over The Holidays

Mail’s machine learning head, Dmitry Merkushov, explained that users turned to AI to simplify work tasks and create memorable celebrations. He noted that requests for personalized and original greetings highlighted the demand for creativity during the festive period.

The analysis also revealed geographic trends:

  • Moscow accounted for 64% of all AI requests.
  • Kaluga came in second with 21%.
  • Chita users made 15% of requests.

In terms of age, 54% of users who accessed AI were between 25 and 44 years old.

Significant Growth In AI Use

During Q4 2024, Mail AI saw a 68% increase in user activity compared to the previous quarter. Analysts attribute this spike to year-end preparations and holiday activities. The introduction of interactive game mechanics, such as virtual AI Tamagotchi, likely boosted user engagement as well.

Generative AI became widely available to Mail.ru users in 2023, with features like AI-powered text shortening in Mail notes added in July.

Source: Mail.ru Research
Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor