Why Marissa Mayer wants you to spend less time tapping your phone screen

The former Google and Yahoo executive believes AI should simplify our lives but warns the real battle for the future will be determined by how the US and China embrace this technology.

Marissa Mayer has spent her career at the centre of some of Silicon Valley's biggest moments. She was among Google's earliest employees and its first female engineer, helping to shape the search engine's user experience. She played a key role in many of the company's other now well-known products including maps and Gmail during her 13 years there. Later she would spend five-years as Yahoo's CEO and president, leading the company during a particularly challenging period. Throughout her career, Mayer has always been drawn to the intersection of technology and consumer experience.

Recently, she's been tackling a new challenge at Sunshine, her AI-driven startup focused on making everyday tasks more seamless, starting with managing users' phone contacts and reminding them about birthdays. The company's latest AI-powered photo sharing app reflects Mayer's broader vision for how technology can enhance personal connections and interactions.

"I'm a techno-optimist," Mayer tells the BBC. "I believe that AI, when applied thoughtfully, can free up time, strengthen relationships and ultimately bring more joy."

Over the years, Mayer has served on the boards of companies including Walmart and AT&T while also backing startups such as Minted and Square. In 2018, a year after resigning from Yahoo following the sale of its operating business to Verizon for $4.48bn (£3.6bn), Mayer co-founded Lumi Labs with former colleague Enrique Muñoz Torres, with the ambition of bringing AI to everyday consumer tasks. The company rebranded in 2020 as Sunshine after unveiling its first product, Sunshine Contacts, which aimed to use AI to rearrange smartphone users' contacts, delete duplicates and keep information up-to-date. Later it would launch Sunshine Birthdays, which promised to help avoid missing someone's birthday ever again by reminding users and allowing them to order gifts or cards within the app.

The company has since pivoted to Shine: Photo Messaging, a free AI-powered app that claims to help users organise and share photos with facial recognition and automation. It's focused on recognising friends in photos and understanding who was together – whether for a BBQ, wedding or baseball game – by using contacts, location data and facial recognition to cluster images and automatically share them without the usual hassle. Still, like many AI-driven platforms, particularly those using facial recognition, the concept raises questions about data privacy and storage. (The company's website says it puts privacy first by requiring user consent before sharing photos but does store data and disclose certain information to third parties but does not sell it).

Although she sees AI's potential to make people's lives easier, Mayer acknowledges there are  challenges ahead, particularly when it comes to regulation, consumer trust, and ethical oversight of this emerging technology.

Mayer spoke to the BBC about her vision for Sunshine, the evolving role of AI in daily life and what keeps her up at night.

After spending years running Yahoo and parts of Google, how did you decide what you wanted to do next?

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and try founding something. I've always thought about how technology can bring people closer together and give people more time back. There were lots of things I loved about Google Search for the decade that I ran it, and one was giving people information and their time back because search was better, faster and more efficient. When I founded Sunshine, I really wanted to think about how we could make people's relationships stronger, and how people could spend less time on the screen tapping on things, and more time with each other doing things that are of higher value.

What do you make of big tech's close relationship with President Donald Trump's administration?

I'm by no means a political expert. So, I think that's an area I'm really remiss to comment on. I know overall I respect a lot of the players who are in the space and in that political dialogue on both sides. But I think it's really hard to say… particularly in the tech space where things are moving so quickly.

Are you concerned about tariffs on trade and imports impacting your company? For example, a memo signed by President Donald Trump recently promised to impose tariffs on digital services from countries that placed burdensome regulations on US technology companies.

I think eventually it may touch the company, but right now we're very focused on the US and English-speaking markets – and it's all digital goods. At the moment, I think the tariffs are unlikely to affect us.

You've long been one of the more prominent female leaders in tech. How do you view the progress made for women in the industry? What are some of the biggest remaining challenges there?

A lot has happened over the past 25 years of my career. I've been lucky to have been at places that are very empowering to women. That was true both at Google and Yahoo and it certainly is at Sunshine. It's also been true in my board work within those companies. I would like to see more women entering tech. It involves acquiring talent and retaining talent by having the right environment where they can be promoted and thrive. One of the things we identified early at Google was that, yes, there needs to be more women, but you also need to have an environment with men who are good at working with women. It's about selecting for an accepting environment.

Silicon Valley has long been associated with a "tech bro" culture. How have you seen the culture evolve over time?

At Google, we were so focused… that gender really did fade into the background. I didn't think about the fact that I was one of a few technical women there. In my leadership team at Yahoo, we had more than half women. Here at Sunshine, more than half of our engineers are women. I've always been in playing fields where I think women have been really respected and very much on equal footing, even if we weren't at equal numbers. From that perspective, I didn't necessarily have a hard time because I started my career at Google and was there for the first 13 years. A lot of strong women came out of that culture… including Jen Fitzpatrick [senior VP of core systems and experiences], who's very senior there now, and Sheryl Sandberg [former chief operating officer at Meta].

What did you learn during your time at Yahoo and Google that you're bringing over to Sunshine?

So many things. I will say that focus on the product and a great user experience at the center of the design and development process has been part of all the companies I've been involved with. It's a very centering force. It's what really drives our ambition… and turns out superior technologies.

You joined Yahoo at a time when it faced challenges in innovation and competition. What do you believe was your greatest accomplishment there?

On the product side, I came to Yahoo to bring the company into the mobile era. When I arrived, we basically had no mobile products… and less than 30 global engineers in the company of 18,000. In fairness to Yahoo, it was 2012. I had really sold the board on the idea that much of what Yahoo had in its arsenal was stock, sports scores, news, weather, email and things that could thrive on the phone. But to do that, we had to build a mobile team. 

The first half of my time there – two and a half years – we had 600 mobile engineers. Apple identified us as the biggest iOS shop in the world. We won back-to-back app of the year awards – when Apple was only giving one a year – for Yahoo weather and Yahoo user Digest. We transformed that product suite and really brought it into the mobile era and ultimately started generating almost $2bn (£1.6bn). And part of that was the growth of mobile. So I'm really proud of what we accomplished in terms of the product offering and making it mobile first.

How does Shine differentiate itself in a marketplace crowded with photo sharing services?

For the first few years at Sunshine, we worked on contacts and built what I believe is a best-of-breed contacts app. We are really overall excited about it, but it is not viral. No one walks around saying, oh my gosh, my contact manager is so great. So this past year, we've pivoted and gone to something in the space that everyone else is more passionate about, and that's photos and events. But it's the same idea… how do you apply AI to everyday tasks? How can these technologies bring people closer together and give them time back?

Tell us how Shine does that for photos.

Right now, we're really focused on how we can help people share photos more efficiently by recognising your friends in photos and making it easier to share in small groups. If you're just going to share a photo person-to-person, you can text. If you want to share it with hundreds of people, there's always Instagram and Threads. But if you actually want to take a whole set of photos from [an experience] and then share it with anywhere from five to a few hundred people, that almost certainly involves cross-platforms between iOS and Android, which means neither Google Photos nor Apple Photos is really often the right solution for that group.

It's often so much trouble that people just don't share the photos at all. So it's taking things like facial recognition, an understanding of your contacts and location and really trying to put together a whole picture of: who is this group, why were they together, and how would they want to share that photo.

As an AI startup, do you worry about AI regulations?

Partnerships between the government and thought leaders on both sides, both pessimists and optimists, are going to be absolutely critical. Even experts and people who are trying to stay apprised of everything, and really understand where things are and where they're going, have blind spots. It's very hard right now to keep up. I worry that sometimes we [in the US] get into a mindset that's very isolationist, thinking just about the US or the West. We don't necessarily think about the fact that there are a lot of AI technologies being developed elsewhere – in China in particular. They may have very different value systems than what we have. If we pump the brakes too hard with regulation and regulate this innovation, I don't think that same slowing will happen there.

I think DeepSeek makes the point more obvious now. The real competition in terms of how AI is developed and adopted is between the US and China, not between any two companies. Inherent to the US-China AI competition is a tension between the common good and individual liberties, particularly in terms of how the AI is used. Which country is the leader in the AI space will fundamentally impact our global future. This isn't necessarily a values-based statement about which is better, but it raises questions like whether AI should prioritise public safety through large-scale surveillance or uphold strict privacy protections even at the risk of reduced oversight.

Where do you think we'll be with AI in the next year or even five to 10 years?

I'm incredibly optimistic about AI. I hope that it touches most of what we do. There's an adage that people tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term, and that's true generally in technology. I remember being five and watching the Jetsons and being like, wow, when I'm 30 they'll be flying cars. I'll be almost 50... and we're well past that mark and nowhere close to a safe flying car yet, but they are getting closer all the time.

At the same time, when I was five, the internet didn't even exist. It has really transformed everything in terms of how we work, learn and navigate the world. AI is moving very fast. I wonder if this is going to be one of the first technologies that breaks that adage where it actually might surpass our expectations in the near term. I certainly think it's going to surpass our expectations in the longer term in terms of what it can do and what can happen.

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