Profile • Executive • Accessibility
He spent 12 years growing a communications firm. Three at Facebook. Then he walked away from the corporate ladder to run an app that helps blind people see the world.
Michael Buckley • Chairman & CEO, Be My Eyes • San Francisco
There are 253 million people on earth who are blind or visually impaired. Most of them can't read a prescription label unassisted, or check which bus just pulled up, or see whether the stove is off.
Michael Buckley runs the organization trying to change that. Be My Eyes connects blind and low-vision users with sighted volunteers - and now with AI - through live video calls. It is the world's largest digital volunteer organization. You don't pay to use it. No one gets paid to volunteer. The 6.7 million people who signed up did so because they wanted to spend three minutes helping a stranger navigate a parking meter.
Buckley arrived as Chairman and CEO in December 2022. He is not the founder. Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a Danish craftsman who is himself visually impaired, launched Be My Eyes in 2015. But Buckley is the executive who turned a beloved nonprofit into an AI-forward accessibility platform that TIME magazine noticed, enterprises like Microsoft and Google adopted, and investors put $6.1 million into as recently as January 2025.
Before any of this, Buckley was a communications man. A very good one. He spent 12 years at Brunswick Group's San Francisco office, arriving when the firm billed $1 million and departing as Managing Partner when it billed more than $80 million. Then Facebook hired him as VP of Global Business Communications. That is the kind of resume that could have led anywhere - a corner office, a fund, a public company board. He chose a volunteer platform instead.
"We all have limited time on the planet. How do you want to spend your time? Where do you want to spend your money? Ideally, it's in areas that make a difference in people's lives or for humanity."- Michael Buckley, Chairman & CEO, Be My Eyes
A blind user opens the app and connects with a sighted volunteer via live video. The volunteer describes what the camera sees - an expiration date, a street sign, a form to fill out. The average call is under three minutes.
Launched in March 2023, Be My AI uses GPT-4 to provide instant visual descriptions - a 24/7 AI volunteer that never sleeps, never has a queue. TIME named it one of the best inventions of that year.
Be My Eyes for Business brings the platform into corporate environments. Microsoft, Google, P&G, Sony, Spotify, and Amtrak have all integrated Be My Eyes to serve blind customers and employees.
A partnership with InnoSearch AI brings in-app accessible shopping - letting blind users get visual product information while browsing, without leaving the app.
Be My Eyes acquired AppleVis, the essential resource for blind and low-vision Apple device users, bringing a vast community and knowledge base under one roof.
Be My Eyes operates across more than 150 countries and 140+ languages, with a team of 370 people working to make the platform universally accessible.
Buckley's arrival at Be My Eyes in December 2022 was not a crisis hire. The platform already had millions of volunteers and a loyal user base. What it needed was someone who understood enterprise sales cycles, how to pitch a corporation on accessibility, and how to build a product team that could ship fast without breaking what made the app beloved in the first place.
He knew the company from the inside. He had invested in Be My Eyes in 2018 when it was earlier, smaller, and more obviously a nonprofit story than a technology play. Four years of board-level observation meant he arrived with context most CEOs take eighteen months to acquire. He knew which problems were structural and which were noise.
The timing of Be My AI was not accidental. OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023. Buckley's team had Be My AI - a GPT-4 powered virtual volunteer - ready to launch in the same window. In a world where every company was racing to claim an AI story, Be My Eyes had a genuinely useful one: an AI that could describe a product label in plain language to a blind user who was standing in a supermarket aisle at 9pm, when no human volunteer was available. TIME noticed. The press noticed. The enterprise procurement teams noticed too.
The enterprise pivot matters more than it might seem. Be My Eyes had always been free and volunteer-driven - but that model has limits. Corporations have resources that nonprofits don't. When Microsoft integrates Be My Eyes as a support tool for blind customers using Microsoft 365, that is not a charitable donation. That is a business buying a service. And it funds the free tier for everyone else.
Buckley's background in corporate communications gave him a specific fluency here. At Brunswick Group, his clients were publicly traded companies managing crises, mergers, and regulatory battles. At Facebook, he was responsible for how the company explained itself to the world during some of its most scrutinized years. Neither job is the same as selling enterprise SaaS - but both require understanding how decisions are made inside large institutions, and how to frame a value proposition for someone who has 40 other things on their agenda.
The seaweed company is worth mentioning because it tells you something about how Buckley operates. He co-founded Ocean's Halo in 2012, before plant-based snacking was a category that retailers were chasing. The company raised $26.5 million over multiple rounds. It is not the kind of venture you start if you are only interested in status or salary. It is the kind you start if you are genuinely interested in the problem.
That pattern repeats. The Bloomberg 2020 campaign communications role in California. The Twilio VP of Communications position. These are not the moves of someone accumulating credentials. They look more like a person who keeps finding things that interest them and committing to doing them well.
Buckley has described his motivation at Be My Eyes in simple terms: he believes in the work. He thinks human volunteers will always be part of the platform because human connection cannot be fully replicated by an AI model, no matter how capable. Be My AI handles the 3am descriptions. The human calls handle something else - the conversation, the relationship, the sense that someone on the other side of the screen actually showed up.
"I hope that the volunteer and human-to-human connection always remains at the heart of Be My Eyes," he has said. That sentence is interesting because it comes from the CEO who also launched the AI product. The tension between those two things - AI efficiency and human warmth - is the central strategic question of his tenure.
On the personal side: Buckley is a graduate of Marist University, where he studied communications and political science. He is the father of two teenage daughters. He plays guitar and sings in a band he calls The Love Handles - "the mother of all Dad bands," in his own description. The band is probably not a side hustle. It sounds more like something that keeps a person grounded when the rest of their week involves raising money and managing a 370-person company.
He is based in San Francisco, which remains the center of gravity for the Be My Eyes team even as the company operates globally. The company's $27 million in total funding, 370 employees, and $55.8 million in estimated annual revenue suggest an organization that has moved decisively from its volunteer-network origins into something more durable and scalable.
What Buckley has built at Be My Eyes - in under three years - is a platform where AI and human volunteers coexist, where enterprises pay to provide accessibility to their customers, and where a blind user in rural Japan and a blind user in downtown Atlanta can both get help reading an expiration date on a Tuesday morning. The specifics of the problem are unglamorous. The scale of it is not.
"Every time after a volunteer hangs up the phone, you feel great because you just did a small service for another human being and have made their life a little bit better."
"The mission has been, and always will be, to make the world a more accessible place. The only way to do so is by collectively growing our impact."
"Our thesis is working together and combining forces increases our impact."
"We all have limited time on the planet. How do you want to spend your time? Where do you want to spend your money? Ideally, it's in areas that make a difference in people's lives or for humanity."
"I hope that the volunteer and human-to-human connection always remains at the heart of Be My Eyes."- Michael Buckley, on AI vs. human connection at Be My Eyes