In Conversation With Ux Magazine

Mastercard's central AI team receives roughly a thousand requests a year from across the organization. A few years ago, most of them were for chatbots. Today, most are for AI agents. Federico Cohen Freue, Executive Vice President of AI & Data Operations at Mastercard, has watched this shift in real time and knows exactly what it reveals about how enterprises are (and aren't) thinking about AI.In this episode, Federico explains why the name people use for what they want matters less than whether they understand the conditions that make it work. “Ball bearings,” as Robb Wilson puts it: demos can't reveal the difference between a solution that will hold and one that will blow up the engine. What actually matters is training, fluency, and a clear framework for where to deploy AI with purpose.For Mastercard, that framework is deliberate: use AI to make commerce more secure, smarter, more personal, and to make the company itself stronger. Not everything. Those things. The simplicity is a feature, it gives a spr