The modern professional has mastered productivity but often at the cost of peace. We optimize calendars, automate tasks, and track deliverables down to the minute, yet many women still wake each morning already managing invisible to-do lists no one else can see.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo calls this the invisible load: the unpaid, unrecognized mental work that keeps households and teams functioning. Studies show women spend an additional 68 full days each year performing it. “It’s the emotional operating system that keeps life running,” she said, “and it rarely gets any credit.”
After building Care.com into a global company serving millions of families, Marcelo came out of retirement to confront this imbalance head-on – this time with AI as an ally rather than an adversary. Her new venture, Ohai.ai, is designed to reduce cognitive fragmentation by creating a “smart helper” that makes the invisible visible.
“AI can’t love your child or comfort your team,” she explained, “but it can handle the repetitive, low-value tasks that drain us every day.”
What follows are five interlocking ideas that define Marcelo’s philosophy of human-centered technology and a framework for restoring time, clarity, and care in an age of overload.
Marcelo begins with awareness. “You can’t pour from an empty cup, and you can’t delegate your depletion,” she said. The first act of liberation is acknowledging the weight you hold – whether emotional, logistical, or mental. She encourages women to speak openly about the invisible work they do and to design systems that lighten it rather than normalize it.
Solving burnout, Marcelo argues, requires structural, not personal, change. “We’ve optimized for productivity, not for humanity,” she said. Technology should free bandwidth, not consume it. Her goal with Ohai is to coordinate the noise of everyday life: emails, school alerts, group texts, into a single, organized flow. “Everyday life coordination,” she calls it, “so we can think deeply again.”
Integrating AI into family life raises real questions of privacy and trust. For Marcelo, credibility comes from design integrity: a human-in-the-loop model, zero-retention data policies, and opt-in memory controls. “We’re training the AI the same way I’d train an assistant,” she explained. “Families should always control what’s remembered and what isn’t.”
“Tools should serve clarity, not create chaos,” Marcelo reminded. With most people juggling dozens of apps, she’s building Ohai to synchronize rather than add another layer. Its upcoming “Smart Sync” pilot aggregates all of yourhousehold’s digital systems, from school calendars to grocery lists, into one weekly summary. The objective is simple: less cognitive clutter, more calm.
Ultimately, Marcelo’s work is animated by what she calls maternal AI: technology built with empathy, care, and moral grounding. “AI isn’t here to replace humanity, it’s here to protect it,” she said. That conviction extends to how she leads teams and mentors founders: with transparency, humility, and love.
“Ask yourself,” she offered, “am I leading to impress or to inspire? If you lead with love, your team, and your technology, will follow.”
