Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: It's not either or for many of your viewers, what I might say, it's not either or. It's. And so that's important to think about compliance. But you take a different lens of the employee and that gives you a totally different perspective and you bring the two together. That can be a win win for everyone.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome to a new episode of the what Works podcast series.
In this episode, Cathy Andaris sits down with Anshul Shyapuri, Executive Vice President of People, Operations and Insights at mastercard.
Together they discuss how mastercard is strategically leveraging AI to enhance HR operations, improve employee experiences, and drive business outcomes.
Let's get to it, Angel. Welcome to the what Works podcast.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: Thanks for having me, Kathy.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: I'm so excited for this conversation and I know we'll dive right in. But before we dive in, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at MasterCard.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: So I have the privilege and the honor of heading up people, operations and insights at MasterCard. And what that means is across the employee life cycle, from hire to alumni, delivering great experiences to our employees in a way that thinks about the experience but also the quality of that experience and the delivery of that experience is all part of what I look at.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: I know MasterCard has grown a lot in the last few years. How has that impacted how you're delivering to your employees and what the services and solutions are?
[00:01:40] Speaker A: So certainly we look at when we think about the experience we deliver to our employees, we think about bringing together key facets, whether it's process, technology, data, insights, and AI, and bringing all those together in the right way to deliver great experiences to our employees. Right. And as you referenced our growth, we're blessed to have a phenomenal business model and we've grown quite tremendously. With that comes the need to operate at scale and at speed. And what better way to operate at speed and scale than to deliver operationally excellent experiences? So maybe I'll give you a couple of examples.
You know, when you want to hail a cab, you use your favorite ride sharing app and you know, you just go into the app and put in your location and you're able to hail that.
Just yesterday I went out for dinner with my wife and all that required was to open our favorite restaurant reservation app and plop, put the date, put the restaurant name and you and you have your reservation. We're really using those kinds of experiences as inspiration and thinking about what that means for our employees and for our team members here. So I'll give you a couple of examples.
If you think about candidates we have a number of candidates that apply to MasterCard. How do they schedule interviews with recruiters and with hiring managers? Well, we're using the same experience that I had with my restaurant reservation app as inspiration. And today candidates and recruiters can go into this kind of system and find a suitable slot to make a reservation to meet. I'll give you another example. Employees all the time may require an employment verification letter. You may need it mortgage to get a visa to engage with all kinds of agencies that matter. Right. And the requirements could be different depending on which country you're in and what purpose that letter requires. But imagine, as opposed to having a conversation with somebody, if you could just at a click of a button, get a letter that you want that really changes your experience, the speed of that delivery and the scale of that delivery of the experience at the last mile. And that's how we're really thinking about the end to end experience for our employees.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: I love that because I think a lot of times when we're thinking about HR operations, we might think more about compliance and HR efficiency, but you're already putting the employee front and center and really thinking about how do we make it easiest for the employer and work backwards.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Correct. And it's not either or for many of your viewers, what I might say, it's not either or. It's. And that's important to think about compliance. But you take a different lens of the employee and that gives you a totally different perspective and you bring the two together, that can be a win win for everyone.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Of course, we would like it to happen like we do it with the consumer app, so with a restaurant app, with a car healing app. But I know it's much more complicated. So how do you simplify it so much?
[00:04:40] Speaker A: Like with all good things, the, you know, the first step is prioritization and being clear where you want to add value in the journey. Right. And from my sort of vantage point, there are always two things that need to come together, Business value and user value. So it needs to be a great thing that delivers value to the business. So in the example I gave you around interview scheduling, it rapidly reduces the time to fill jobs, so it really matters to the business. It reduces back and forth between the candidate and employee. So it improves, improves the candidate experience through this, through the journey. And in the case of letter generation, think about the productivity it unleashes because somebody is not manually having to create those letters. So really being clear on the business value, but also what does it mean to the user in terms of Their experience. So that's one vantage point we take in terms of really prioritizing the top things that matter. The other thing, of course, that we look at is where do we really think the world is shifting towards and what are the big changes that are coming in the landscape? So maybe I'll give you an example a few years ago, and this is even before my time at MasterCard, so I take absolutely no credit, but I'm sharing the story nevertheless.
You know, around when Covid was a topic of quite a lot of energy and focus, we sort of decided that we really need a talent marketplace to unleash the energy of our employees who want to be able to have the mentorship, the stretch projects and those experiences. But now that people were not in office, how do you give them that experience? Right. And so we launched this internal talent marketplace which has AI powered nudges of jobs or mentors that you might want to talk to. And what's been fascinating about that marketplace, and, you know, many other companies have it too, but the adoption that we have of that Marketplace, it's around 90% people are on the marketplace, around 35 to 40% use it every month. So just think about the repeat adoption, which in my experience is all pretty high compared to benchmarks that I have seen, but also what it does for our employees in terms of their career trajectories and making that more effective, but what it does for our business because it unlocks capacity for our business to move faster as well.
So it's really thinking about where our big shifts coming from the external standpoint and using that also to prioritize.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: This is a great way of thinking about it because the business value is really high. You're saving a lot of money. Obviously, you don't have to go to outside consultants for a lot of the projects. Right. So that's huge business value, but from an employee value, incredibly high too, because lots of employees in many organizations and yours is probably similar. The lack of career opportunities is the most important cited reason why people leave their organization. Right?
[00:07:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: It's usually not the manager.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: It's.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: It's because they don't see a path for themselves. And then they say, I'm going to go somewhere where I feel I have a path. And I think that's creating that employee value as well.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: 100%. And I think, you know, other interesting thing is doing that, but doing that in a way that people really think of the platform as irresistible and really want to come back to it. It's not just a tool out there that, you know, go to once in a while. But really creating that virtuous cycle, I think truly unlocks the value for the organization.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: And you mentioned AI. Of course, AI plays into that. So how does, how do you see the impact of AI in all of these perspectives? Like whether that's creating efficiency for HR operations, which I know is critically important, and also creating a better employee experience and even maybe creating better outcomes as well?
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah, no, definitely. So, you know, I like to look at this from two angles. One is the outcomes that it delivers for the company and the employees. And then the how. How do we make. Make it happen? Right. So from the outcome standpoint, I think of it from three dimensions.
Quality, cost, and experience. So is it delivering better quality decisions?
The experience, is it more personalized to you?
And then, of course, productivity in terms of, is it really taking away tasks that, you know, not necessarily need to do? So those are the sort of three angles of outcomes through which we try and focus our use cases and the efforts that we want to go down the path of. And then from a purse, from the standpoint of the how. Right. What I would say is there are two sort of questions we try and ask ourselves. One is what are the foundational building blocks that we need for AI? Second, having the right data foundations around it, because obviously ultimately the AI is trained on data. So how do you, how do you make sure that that occurs?
Training, really talking about it openly. How do we need to train our employees, our colleagues in the HR function so they're also equipped to answer questions when those arise? I think that's sort of another really important thing we look at. So those are sort of the different angles.
The last one, which we're spending a lot of time on, is really thinking about build, borrow, buy decisions. So when should we buy a technology off the shelf?
When should we be building it in house? Where do we want to have critical differentiation? And where is something available off the shelf that we can leverage immediately?
[00:10:14] Speaker B: I'd love to actually dive into that last piece that you are bringing up, which was the build by borrow decisions on what AI to use. Because I know many, many of our listeners probably are thinking about that, that same way that should I just use basically what my vendors, my already existing tech companies offer. Should I build my own one?
How does it figure in with like, the vendors obviously will continue advancing it, but how does it need to be differentiated for our own purposes? Where do you sit on that? How do you make those decisions?
[00:10:46] Speaker A: Yeah, and you know, like with all good things we try and get a grasp of where the external marketplace is headed. So if it's a very mature capability in the marketplace, then you know, it really doesn't make sense for us to be investing in building that capability in house. So that's one angle to it in terms of how mature is the capability in the marketplace. The other angle, if I take the two by two of it, is how differentiated is our need for most of the world. You know, if you have a certain need, everyone else has the same need for most of the set of use cases.
So it probably doesn't require us to have a differentiated need. But it could be cases where depending upon our business model, the need might be more differentiated, maybe something very unique to our business that makes a need differentiated, that then requires us to have sort of build nature of the solution. So we look at how common is a solution in the marketplace, how unique is our need, and depending on where it lands relative to those that two by two we might go for build or buy.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Can you give me some examples of each of those where you had the need to build your own versus where you could buy something from a vendor?
[00:11:59] Speaker A: So I think like the internal talent marketplace is a great example that I just gave. It's, it's getting more and more mature as a capability in the industry.
Our need set from that had some uniqueness, but not very, very unique around it. So that was more about leveraging the vendor capability, but doing it in a way that makes sense for us. And there I think our investment and our thought leadership is more in the area of how do we really drive a high level of adoption. It's less about the, the tool and the technology in itself. So that's a good example of mature capability in the marketplace. And our need is relatively less differentiated. But change management and adoption is us the value proposition we bring to the table. An example I might give on the other side, where our need is more unique is in the area of sales productivity.
So really want to understand the drivers of sales productivity. How do we make workforce decisions around that that's unique to a workforce that is of our type. So we needed to have a fairly build nature of the solution in that, in that context. So that's an example which I would say is more build centric.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: How do you keep the tool, like a built tool up to date? Because I know this is always challenging because this is not your core business, right. So how do you make sure that this keeps improving and you keep up with like new developments in the market and all that?
[00:13:28] Speaker A: I think the first thing, at least the way I like to think about this is one, you shouldn't be doing more than what you can consume from a business consumption standpoint, but also change capacity and what you can produce. Right. So our portfolio is quite heavily tilted towards buy build is very, very sort of focused and narrow. Right. So that's just one. So that creates a capacity for us to be able to do the build that we do. We do it well because if we do too much then we will spread the peanut butter. Right. One, one is that second is really try and leverage some of these practices in our commercial businesses and bring them to bring more of this product management mindset to bear in the way we do AI application or AI tool development in house even for, for our HR function. So thinking about it, even though it's a build capability and it's the HR function, what the customers, what's the market opportunity you're looking at, what's the KPIs for success? What is your, I'm going to use this word product roadmap for that, for that solution because I think this notion of bringing commercial practices to bear around product management for in house development I think is a good way of bootstrapping and accelerating our efforts.
[00:14:49] Speaker B: I would love to talk for a few more hours with you but I know we're almost out of time so maybe can you give us a little word of advice for our listeners? How to get started with AI in the HR area and the people practices.
Where do you start? I know you're prioritizing but I know a lot of listeners are wondering like what is a good place to get started and then how do I keep going?
[00:15:14] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe you asked for one but I guess you and I, Kathya are both overachievers so I'll give two pieces of.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: Please give two.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: One is more sort of sage advice around.
I know at times it can feel like there's a lot coming at us. We have a lot of vendor reach out coming at us but everyone is on the same boat. So just one, just keep, just get going, right?
Don't feel like you're the only one alone in this.
There's a whole community out there of practitioners within the operations space or the AI space or analytics space. They're all sort of rowing the board together. So don't feel like you're alone. And then second I would just say listen to your business and your users.
They're the ones who are going to tell you where is the most opportunity or pain in the system. And that's what I would really take to prioritize. So look at your data in terms of your experience surveys, in terms of your case volumes that are coming in terms of employee inquiries. All of that data is a wealth of information to tell you where some of the biggest opportunities are.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: I love that. I mean, we call this fall in love with the problem, not with the solution. Right. Start with the business problem, start where the biggest need is and that's where you can immediately make the biggest impact as well. So really, really great advice.
Well, what's next for you on this journey, on this roadmap? Where are you going to take this AI in HR or in the people practices next?
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe I'll give you a two part answer to this.
I'm really excited about this. One is, and many companies are on this path of really transforming the employee experience with a bot that's going to take care of all your needs.
And I don't mean just answering questions, but really doing work for you in terms of, you know, I want to apply for a vacation and it just does it for you. Right.
But I see the world moving and I, and I know more and more customers are on this journey, making it really contextual. So it remembers what you asked for before and really understands that and uses that to further enhance the conversation. So really transforming the employee experience with I would say 90 to 95% of transaction moving to this bot. That's my North Star in this space. Because I think that can really transform the way we look at this. You're not optimizing within your current process, you're reimagining what the future would be. So that's sort of one angle to the North Star. The other angle to this North Star is, you know, the example I gave you on sales productivity to me is just the tip of the iceberg. I can see applying, changing the way we think about people, insights and people AI to people and business AI or insights. So it really is operating at the intersection of people and business, not just, hey, These are people KPIs and that's business KPIs. And these are two different worlds.
And I think there's just a lot of opportunity to bring those two worlds together to really drive integrated outcomes for the company.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Wow, fantastic. Both of these are great next steps and I think also something to consider for anybody whether you're just starting out on your journey on AI or whether that you're very far ahead. I think those are really amazing words of advice and next steps for you as well. So thank you so much Angel. This was such a great conversation.
I think our listeners will take a lot out of this and all the best for the next steps of the journey.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: Well thank you Kathy for having me. I truly enjoyed the conversation. Best of luck to you too.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
Thanks for joining us for this insightful episode of the what Works podcast series.
Angel Shiapuri, Executive Vice President of People Operations in the insights at MasterCard and I went deep into a really hot topic, how to make AI in HR work for you. Anshul explained how to go beyond HR efficiency gains, focusing on improving the employee experience and driving business outcomes and he made it easy to see how to get started prioritizing one business problem at a time. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe and stay tuned for more thought provoking discussions with industry leaders.
Until next time, continue exploring what works.
