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Mastercard says AI is helping it to schedule candidate interviews 90% faster, among other benefits including serving as a wellbeing guide and improving the speed of workflows.
The payment technology company’s EVP of People Operations and Insights, Anshul Sheopuri, and Chief Talent and Organization Effectiveness Officer, Lucrecia Borgonovo, outlined five AI applications to the employee experience in a blog post on Monday.
AI serves as a career coach, a wellbeing guide, a workflow assistant, a copilot, and a workforce planning partner, to Mastercard’s employees and people teams, reportedly providing benefits to its employees, managers, and HR teams.
Employee support
According to the article, 90% of employees are on its AI-powered internal talent marketplace “Unlocked,” which matches them based on skills to opportunities including open roles, mentoring and learning pathways, and volunteering or short-term projects.
“It's great for our company — and great for career development and growth,” write Sheopuri and Borgonovo. “A third of employees who participated in a project or mentoring have seen a role change or promotion.”
Other employee-centric applications of AI within its workplace include real-time meeting summaries and intelligent calendar scheduling support to prevent employees from becoming bogged down with meetings.
Manager support
Mastercard says AI is also being used to automate workflows, thereby improving their speed and efficiency. This includes reminding managers to approve vacation requests, and scheduling candidate interviews with hiring managers nearly 90% faster.
The HR leaders also claim AI is a useful partner in monitoring and improving wellbeing by analyzing huge employee feedback datasets. “We use AI sentiment analysis to help us understand key themes and areas of opportunity, and to deliver personalized insights to our employees on how to optimize their working habits,” they explain.
HR and talent team support
Sheopuri and Borgonovo say AI is helping Mastercard’s HR and talent teams with its decision-making. “Using Unlocked, we can see skills across our employee base, learn where we have gaps, and develop learning paths or hiring plans to address them,” the post explains. They add that AI is helping talent leaders make decisions across workforce planning including talent availability and office space utilization.
Mastercard HR leaders emphasize employee training and support
“We recognize the best way to build trust is to bring our employees along with us on our AI journey, ensuring they are made aware of and educated about our commitment to responsible and ethical AI,” say Sheopuri and Borgonovo, noting that AI adoption can bring “questions, curiosities, concerns — even fear” to workers.
“AI is an exciting tool, and that’s important to remember — it’s a tool that people use,” they exert.
Mastercard says to support employees through the transition it is hosting regular sessions to discuss the AI technology it is using and the safeguarding it puts in place.
The company is also running self-paced learning with personalized content depending on the worker’s skill level. “This training is coupled with our commitment to ethical AI and avoiding bias in AI through education of our data privacy and responsibility principles and AI guidelines,” Sheopuri and Borgonovo add.
The post concludes by highlighting its AI journey is underpinned by a company-wide culture change made over a year ago, which it calls “The Mastercard Way.” The two authors say that new cultural capabilities including “thinking big and bold” and “learning and pivoting” have helped its workforce prepare for the changes that AI is bringing.
