EP 17: Governing AI for Real - With Alayna Kennedy, MasterCard

About this episode

The episode discusses the practical implementation of AI governance with Alayna Kennedy from MasterCard.

n Episode 17 of AI in NYC, hosts Rob May, Ryan Eppley, and Anna Kirk sit down with Alayna Kennedy — Director of AI Governance at MasterCard — to talk about what it actually looks like to turn high-minded AI principles into real, operational governance inside one of the world's largest financial companies. Alayna brings a rare combination of hands-on AI model development experience (she built fraud detection models at IBM for a major federal agency) and deep academic credentials in fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning. The conversation digs into the gap between publishing a principles document and actually embedding ethics into your data pipeline, product development, and deployment process. Alayna shares insights from her master's thesis research, where she interviewed data scientists and governance teams across companies to find out who's really putting AI ethics into practice — and who's just posting it on a website. The team also explores the biggest concerns facing major enterprises when it comes to frontier models vs. open source, the ethical blind spots most people miss, and where the real resistance to AI adoption comes from inside large…

People in this episode

Hosts: Rob May, Ryan Eppley, Anna Kirk

Guest: Alayna Kennedy

Topics covered

• AI governance
• ethics in AI
• financial technology
• data science
• machine learning
• enterprise AI adoption

Keywords

• AI principles
• operational governance
• fraud detection
• ethics
• data pipeline
• product development
• AI adoption

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MasterCard, IBM

Places: New York City

More episodes of AI in NYC Show

• EP 26: The Next AI Battle Isn't Technology—It's Trust | Guy Mounier (Boon AI) · June 8, 2026 · 47 min
• EP 26: Building the Next Generation of AI Leaders with Dr. Taniya Mishra · May 29, 2026 · 42 min
• EP25: The Future of AI Storytelling, AGI & Creative Worlds with Hilary Mason · May 21, 2026 · 44 min
• EP 24: Cerebras IPO, Dead Internet & the AI Backlash with Rob May, Ryan Eppley · May 14, 2026 · 40 min
• EP 23: Your AI Is Broken Because Your Data Is with Gabi Steele, Preql · April 29, 2026 · 48 min
• EP 22: Edge AI, Privacy & Japan's Different Approach ft. David Justus, VP of Applied AI @ Panasonic · April 21, 2026 · 41 min