Anshul Sheopuri, EVP, people operations and insights for Mastercard, shares the importance of providing tiered learning and “digital colleagues” to help employees at every level augment their daily workflows.
By Gillian Manning
HRO Today: A recent IBM study suggests that by 2030, business growth will be driven by “innovation over efficiency.” How must the HR leader’s role evolve to become a strategic architect of this new value?
Anshul Sheopuri: At Mastercard, we believe innovation can come from anywhere. In HR, we partner with our counterparts across other businesses and functions to create opportunities for our people to innovate.
One way we’ve already led the way is with our focus on skills. Our team built and scaled a global internal talent marketplace where employees can seek out opportunities to learn new skills or lend their skills to priority projects. Many new products and processes have come from employees engaging on this AI-driven platform.
We’re also thinking about ways to empower our people and create bandwidth for innovation. For example, our HR team used AI to cut time to hire by automating interview scheduling and reducing manual handoffs in the job requisition creation process. This time savings has given our teams valuable bandwidth in their schedules, creating more space for strategy and innovation. And lastly, within and across HR, we are ensuring our processes and organizational structures fit the needs of our people today while setting us up for the future.
HROT: Research suggests productivity gains of 42% by 2030. What is the biggest risk for HR departments that simply use that saved time to increase the volume of old work, rather than reinvesting it into the organization?
Sheopuri: By using AI to automate routine and manual work, we can redirect time and energy toward higher-value activities like innovation, problem-solving, and business partnership where human judgment creates the most value. One tangible example for our team in HR: Our operations team sped up time to schedule interviews by 90% through the use of automation, giving our recruiters and hiring managers back valuable time in their day. They can reinvest this time into more strategic conversations with businesses to advise on current hiring needs and future skills or roles coming down the pipeline.
Our technology recruiting teams have also used this added bandwidth to test new hiring models that have helped us fill key roles and critical skills in a faster, more efficient way. Using AI to work as you always have presents a missed opportunity. To keep pace with the world around us, these tools must help us make space for innovation and strategic execution for what’s next.
HROT: How can leaders drive that reinvestment?
Sheopuri: Leaders are accountable for building an environment where their team members can develop and thrive. Reinvesting time savings and productivity gains into skills development, experimentation, and new ways of working helps employees stay engaged, become future-ready, and ensure they are better equipped to adapt as the business evolves.
HROT: How can organizations prevent a disconnect where senior-level AI decisions outpace a mid-level manager’s ability to execute?
Sheopuri: Our AI journey is people-focused, ensuring we bring everyone along on this journey. We have people who are just starting out and others who are deep technical experts looking to expand on their capabilities. Through our tiered AI learning offerings and “test and learn” culture, our mid-level leaders build confidence and capability at their own pace. This people-first approach helps leaders translate AI ambition into real, everyday impact for their teams.
HROT: What tools are necessary to bridge that gap?
Sheopuri: We know there are plenty of tools out there for people to test and learn—and we encourage that. For us, this looks like AI tools that help draft emails and presentations, summarize meetings, and analyze data. It augments work by helping our people collaborate with “digital colleagues” to increase efficiency. This supports work like automating repetitive tasks, supporting customer interactions, accelerating software development, and acting as knowledge partners for teams.
In HR, we’ve been augmenting our work with a digital coaching tool that’s helping us increase our leadership skills and practice for conversations with our teams and peers. And finally, when we think about AI helping us reimagine how work gets done, we are considering our workflows and where work should be people-led versus agent-operated. This transformation frees employees from routine tasks, unlocking time and capacity for higher-value, creative, and strategic work that drives business impact.
