Former Yahoo CEO Mayer shares views on current tech scene
Marissa Mayer has long been an inspiration for innovative women battling to break through gender barriers in a male-dominated technology industry.
Google only hired 19 employees at its start, but among them was its first female engineer, Marissa Mayer, who later became CEO of Yahoo and is now leading Sunshine, a tech startup.
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 the 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.
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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 your contacts, for a monthly fee of $4.99, we can go to places like LinkedIn and add things that you may not have added yourself.
Q: What kinds of things do you worry about with the advent of AI?
A: It is a very powerful technology and whenever you have a powerful technology things can go wrong. The powers are amazing, but they also introduce a whole new level of safety concern. My fears are somewhat different than some of the people who are worried about AI overlords and things like that. Mine is just we are starting to get close to technologies that approximate human intelligence.
When you have a machine that is almost as intelligent as humans, the odds that humans end up getting fooled that it’s real — that it isn’t a machine — just get higher. When you have people who can’t tell what’s real anymore and what’s authentic because the machine intelligence is now approximating the human intelligence, that is really the biggest risk.
Q: How do you think the tech industry is doing in terms of hiring and promoting women in leadership roles?
A: There have been steps forward and steps back. I think the representation of women in leadership at the VP (vice president) and director level is getting better across companies. So, it feels like things are improving. Probably not as fast as I would like, but there have been steps in the right direction.
Q: Not long after you became Yahoo CEO, you ordered a lot of employees who were working from home to start coming into the office regularly. Has the pandemic reshaped your thinking about the work in office/at home dynamic?
A: I wasn’t trying to make a broad statement about work-from-home policies back then. I was just being blatantly honest. The company was in trouble and had been in trouble for a long time. It was a turnaround. Somewhere on the order of 1% of (Yahoo) employees had official work-from-home status, but when I got there 10% of the employees were informally working from home whenever they felt like it. And they didn’t have a great setup and their productivity showed it.
I think it is really hard to join an organization that is fully remote because that notion of culture gets lost — things like how to grow management, leadership, vision, the ability to align people around a product and plan around what you are trying to build.
Q: Do you still follow what is going on with Yahoo?
A: I do follow Yahoo. The old saying there is you bleed purple (the color of the company’s old logo) once you have worked there, and I really do. I am really proud of the people who are still there and I am really proud of the people who have left and gone on to do great things across the industry. I still feel very connected to them.
Where companies have adopted AI—and where they are planning to do so in the near future
Where companies have adopted AI—and where they are planning to do so in the near future
On Nov. 30, 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a chatbot driven by artificial intelligence. The app spread like wildfire. Not only did it provide an entertaining companion to chat with, but it also showed promise as a piece of productivity software.
ChatGPT allows users to ask questions about myriad topics and get useful responses in a way that search engines like Google cannot provide. Similar technologies have emerged in all kinds of domains, including image generation, language translation, transcription, computer programming, and more.
Firms across the U.S. are embracing artificial intelligence. To find out which regions are the most enthusiastic about AI, Verbit analyzed data from surveys taken by the Census Bureau in December 2023. Overall, 4.9% of businesses said they were using AI to produce goods or services in the past two weeks, while 6.7% say they plan to within the next six months.
Unsurprisingly, information technology companies are the most eager to use artificial intelligence—22% of respondents from American tech companies said they had used AI for their products or services within the past two weeks. That number actually understates AI’s impact in the field. A survey of computer programmers conducted by JetBrains, a software company, found that 77% of respondents used ChatGPT, while 46% used GitHub Copilot, an AI coding assistant.
Professional, scientific, and technical services were the second-most likely type of firm to respond that they used AI tools, according to the Census Bureau. Law firms are using tools to scan through thousands of past cases. And, according to Tess Bennett, a technology reporter for Financial Review, consultants and accountants are using AI to create PowerPoint presentations and conduct exploratory data analysis.
Top adopters
Some businesses have been quicker to adopt AI than others. Companies in Rhode Island lead the way on this front—8.7% of businesses in the state are currently using AI, nearly twice the rate of companies in the United States as a whole.
Companies on the West Coast and the Southwest tended to be more AI-friendly, while companies in the Rust Belt were likelier to have the lowest interest in using AI tools.
This story matches the Census survey numbers with data on what kinds of companies each state has within its borders and the education level of its workforce to understand why these disparities across states exist.
In general, states with a higher share of businesses in the technology sector also were likely to have more businesses use AI to produce goods and services. However, the weak correlation suggests that despite all of the hype surrounding AI, companies have still been slow to change their practices to adopt the technology.
Getting on the bandwagon
Businesses in Washington D.C., were the most likely to say they planned to adopt AI in the next six months, at 13.7%. Meanwhile, about 9% of businesses in Maryland, Alaska, New Mexico, Rhode Island, and Florida said they planned on implementing AI. Alabama and Delaware were the least enthusiastic about AI adoption—only 3.3% of businesses in the two states reported plans to implement AI.
This analysis of Census data found a much stronger correlation between how many of a state’s firms are in the tech sector and their willingness to implement AI in their business practices in the near future.
Similar trends were found when it came to states with highly educated workforces—in general, the higher the share of a state’s residents with college degrees, the more likely its businesses were to say they were planning on implementing AI. Artificial intelligence might be the future. But Census data reveals it is still early days.
Story editing by Ashleigh Graf. Copy editing by Kristen Wegrzyn.
This story originally appeared on Verbit and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
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