Mastercard's Jill Kramer says AI can be an engine of human creativity and insight

• Jill Kramer, Mastercard's chief marketing and communications officer, was interviewed for the CMO Insider video series.
• She spoke about the responsibility she feels in protecting the Mastercard brand.
• Kramer said marketers should focus on how AI can enable them to do what they could not do before.

When it comes to debates over the role of artificial intelligence in marketing, Jill Kramer, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard, is focused on the upside.

"We need to give ourselves permission to embrace the positive first," she said in a video interview for CMO Insider. "Let's see all that it could be."

Kramer joined Mastercard in December 2025 as chief marketing and communications officer, after more than a decade at Accenture.

She said that marketers need to give themselves permission to embrace the positives of AI because it can be an engine to foster creativity and deeper insights. Kramer said it's important to get specific about AI use cases and ask, "Where within the process of strategy and creativity does it fit, and where does it help you raise the bar?"

The power of the Mastercard brand was one of the things that drew Kramer to take on her new position. "It's not something that marketing does," she said. "It's something that the entire company cares about."

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

The brand belongs to everyone at the company

The strength of the brand is a bit mind-blowing, but it comes from something very simple and very true: Mastercard is a company that cares deeply about its brand. It is in the culture. It is not something that marketing does. It's something that the entire company cares about.

One of the reasons that I made the move is because it was an incredible privilege to work for a company where I knew brand was everything to them. You do always wonder when you get inside, when you're behind those doors, "Is that really what it's like from the inside out?" And I'm very, very happy to say that it is. But we all know those brands that are something everyone loves and protects and nurtures and cares for.

So that's one of the best things and one of the great privileges. With that, of course, comes great stress and responsibility. Everybody who has stewarded this brand — all of us, not just the person who sits in the my role, but everyone on the team — is making decisions that take the brand through that next era.

So what I care deeply about is giving ourselves permission to reflect back, to really understand where we are today, and define where we want it to go so it gets there intentionally and strategically and not accidentally.

Marketers need every tool at their disposal today, including AI

It does feel like a lifetime of artificial intelligence already, and it hasn't been that long. I think it was a privilege to be where I was when AI came onto the scene, at Accenture, at a company whose whole focus is: What is the next wave of technology going to do to enterprise functions, industry, et cetera? It gave me a super early peek and permission to learn very, very early on.

I think the biggest thing about AI is that we spend a lot of time debating whether it's the best thing or the worst thing to ever happen to marketing. I wish we would free ourselves of that construct. We, as marketing communications people, know better than anybody that nothing is ever that clear-cut. It absolutely can be both. It very often is both, and it's the decisions that you make that decide which side of the path you're on.

I believe that with the conditions we're facing in the world today, economic pressure, social pressure, global pressures, that we need every tool at our disposal to do the best potential marketing communications that we absolutely can.

AI is absolutely a tool that can and should serve that. If we look at it as what AI does versus what we do, or at the efficiencies and headcount implications only, we're missing the ability to answer the question, "What else could I do that I could never do before because this tool now exists?"

Maybe there's some naiveté built into that, but I think we need to give ourselves permission to embrace the positive first. Let's see all that it could be.

AI can power human creativity and deeper insights

With AI as a tool and an engine of driving creativity, it's really all about the breadth, the aperture that you can open up when you're doing your research, when you're doing your preparation, that will make the ideas flow and the creativity flow.

I was recently in Japan, and we didn't have a ton of time to prepare, but the team there, the strategy, and the cultural deep-dives that we did were mind-blowing and so inspiring. And a lot of that was facilitated by the tools available today to gather, to distill, and to process so much content in a short period of time.

So getting specific on the actual use of AI, and where within the process of strategy and creativity does it fit, and where does it help you raise the bar? The Japan workshop that I recently participated in was a great example of how we probably would have had a similar discussion, but with less breadth and less depth, had AI not been a tool that the team used.