Ex-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer discusses the current tech scene from vantage point of her AI startup

Marissa Mayer has long been an inspiration for innovative women battling to break through the gender barriers in a male-dominated technology industry. 

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 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?