How Mastercard is building ‘AI into every point of the employee experience’

As the leader of Mastercard’s People Operations and Insights team, Anshul Sheopuri is focused on creating a “delightful” employee experience (EX) at scale – from hire to retire, and beyond.

To achieve this, Sheopuri and his team oversee Mastercard’s operations, technology products, data, and insights within the people function, collaborating with businesses to transform insights into actionable strategies, all to enhance EX throughout the entire lifecycle.

Ahead of his session at the International Festival of HR, UNLEASH spoke to Sheopuri to gain a deeper understanding of Mastercard’s HR strategy, while discovering the business’s key priorities – particularly regarding data and AI.

Leveraging AI to improve EX

Mastercard has made it a priority to build AI into every point of the EX, for example, by using the tool to automatically place interviews on hiring manager’s calendars, and reducing back-and-forth of scheduling to result in interviews getting confirmed 90% faster, consequently helping businesses fill roles faster.

The business is also using the tool to support its employees’ wellbeing by delivering reminders to schedule focus time after meetings or summarizing notes and emails.

Mastercard is also leveraging the tool in the internal talent marketplace to automatically match employees to opportunities in short-term projects, mentorships, career paths, and learning.

This is a way of providing career growth opportunities to employees, while simultaneously helping businesses fill skill gaps within their teams.

“You can’t underestimate the value of skills like critical thinking, learning agility, and collaboration because technology will continue to grow and evolve, but the need for humans to engage with it in a meaningful and strategic way will always remain,” Sheopuri begins.

In the case of AI, you need critical thinking to develop the right prompts and problem-solving to ensure you’re developing solutions that are ethical and responsible.

“We say at Mastercard that the only AI is responsible and ethical AI.”

To make sure this is followed through into all of Mastercard’s practices, the business has several guardrails in place, including an AI and Data Governance Council, Data Privacy and Responsibility Principles, and frameworks for ensuring that AI-driven practices are fair, unbiased, transparent, and ethical by design.

“AI is the enabler, not the decision-maker,” Sheopuri adds. “We are educating and empowering our employees to use AI to support their work, to provide them with greater bandwidth for the critical decision-making and strategic thinking that they are responsible for.”

Mastercard’s data-driven approach to HR

As a payments technology company, data is at the heart of what Mastercard does. And this, of course, extends to HR, and how the sector uses data to drive decision-making.

“We are constantly using data as a team – so it’s embedded into our ways of working and collective mindset as a team,” Sheopuri explains.

We use the insights from our employee surveys to drive change throughout the organization; we use data to build our workforce planning strategies; we use data from our talent marketplace to learn more about our global skills across the enterprise; and countless other ways.”

Additionally, Sheopuri has been focused on using this approach to foster a data-driven culture within HR, as he believes it’s paramount to deliver a strategy at the intersection of business needs and employee needs.

“These two factors need to work in lockstep,” he adds. “Otherwise you’ll either miss out on strategic value and business outcomes, or on the other end you won’t have the intended user engagement and adoption.

“Throughout my career, my roles have focused on using data to think about our employee journeys – from end to end.

“Now, here at Mastercard, we examine each step of the employee lifecycle – for example: onboarding or promotion/role change or becoming a people leader for the first time – and explore ways to make the process or experience more personal and seamless for our employees.”

By capitalizing on this data-centered, AI approach, Sheopuri and his team are ensuring Mastercard is providing seamless EX, while using technology in a responsible and way.