Generative AI is ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’ in the enterprise, says Mastercard data leader

What a difference a year makes: At the Women in AI breakfast that kicked off VentureBeat Transform 2023 in San Francisco this morning, Mastercard fellow of data & AI JoAnn Stonier said that right now generative AI in the enterprise is like the Oscar-winning movie — Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

That’s a big shift from last July, when the same Women in AI discussion at Transform focused on predictive AI, governance, minimizing bias and model creation. “It was very much a company and organization-by-organization sport,” said Stonier, who was also on the 2022 panel. But now, instead of looking at generative AI from a risk perspective, everyone began to have FOMO, she explained — fear of missing out and being left behind.

Now, with generative AI a team sport, she said, “Every organization is trying to figure out what does it mean to them, the right approach for their enterprise.”

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Emily Roberts, senior vice president, consumer platforms at Capital One and Xiaodi Zhang, vice president, seller experience at eBay, also participated in the Women in AI panel.

The opportunity of generative AI is exciting, said Roberts, but cautioned that for Capital One, nothing has changed yet.

“The promise of what we could do is so exciting, and there’s so much opportunity, and we’ve been thinking about building continuous learning organizations, the structure in how you’re going to apply this to our thinking,” she said. “In the day-to-day, I run consumer platforms, so nothing has changed yet, but a lot of what we want to be thinking about as product leaders is what this can become over time.”

Zhang said that at eBay, the company has been able to introduce generative AI into its listing flow for customers — something they are testing and iterating.

“We’ve been pleasantly surprised by their [customers’] reaction,” she said, adding that eBay customers want efficiency but they also appreciate having control over the tools. She suggested companies consider internal hackathons that leverage employee capabilities in generative AI.

Stonier added that Mastercard has expanded its AI council to evaluate generative AI tools. “We’re seeing things cluster around knowledge management and customer service and chatbots, even advertising and media services — as well as refining interactive tools for our customers — but [we] are not ready to put out there.”

The more important the outcome, she said, there should be a distance between the input and validating the output. “We’re refining what we want to do, but we’re not there yet,” she said.