EP 17: Governing AI for Real - With Alayna Kennedy, 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 organizations. Whether you're building AI products, governing them, or just trying to understand how the biggest companies in the world are navigating this moment, this episode is packed with practical insight. Plus, stick around for the crew's favorite Saturday morning NYC activities Thank you to our sponsor: BePresent https://www.bepresentapp.com/ More of Alayna's work: https://alaynakennedy.github.io/
