Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer interview on AI, remote work, Sunshine app

After graduating from Stanford University, Mayer joined Google in 1999 when the internet search giant was still a startup and then went on to design breakthrough products such as Gmail. She left Google in 2012 to become CEO of Yahoo in an unsuccessful effort to turn around the fading internet pioneer. But Mayer still managed to triple Yahoo’s stock price and create more than $30 billion in shareholder wealth before selling company’s online operations to Verizon Communications in 2017.

Mayer, 48, now runs an artificial intelligence startup called Sunshine with Enrique Muñoz Torres — a former colleague at Google and Yahoo — from a Palo Alto, California, office that served as Facebook’s first headquarters in Silicon Valley. She recently sat down for an interview with The Associated Press.

Q: Sunshine is using AI to manage contacts on a mobile app. Isn’t that a relatively simple task for a sophisticated technology?

A: Our thesis for the company is there are just a lot of mundane tasks that just get in the way. It’s true for a lot of things: contacts, calendaring, scheduling, all those different components take a lot of friction. We think by applying AI – not even necessarily in cutting edge ways — you can both solve valuable problems and you can give people back time. You can also build their confidence in AI.

Q: So how does the Sunshine app work and since it’s free, how are you going to make money?

A: After you install it on your iPhone or your Android phone, we look at your contacts. Then you can hook it up to your email and we go through to see if we can recognize the signature blocks and who you correspond with many times back and forth. If it looks like you are actually engaging in conversations, we will add that person to your contacts. If you like the way we are handling…