Mastercard’s ethical approach to governing AI

In August 2023, Alpian's founding CEO Schuyler Weiss announced his departure, promoting Gianmarco Bonaita to the role. Alpian had pioneered digital Swiss private banking. With three rounds of financing, a full-fledged Swiss banking license from FINMA and a strategic partnership with Fideuram–Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, it also demonstrated a solid B2B potential selling its digital technology. Reinventing the private banking industry for digital natives was no simple feat. Among the most pressing concerns were how to reduce the client acquisition costs, how to diversify private banking services, how broadly to expand Alpian retail services while keeping the costs down and how to develop the fledgling B2B market. Scale was clearly of the essence, and so far it had come at a very high cost. What else could they do to increase brand awareness and client acquisition to accelerate scale up without proportional cost increases? And as if that was not enough, Alpian also had to deal with the agenda of a new majority owner.

Firmenich, the Geneva-founded flavors and fragrances house, built its competitive edge on the tacit, highly specialized craft of its perfumers and flavorists – expertise sitting at the intersection of chemistry and artistry. By 2017 board-level anxiety about digital disruption, and credible signals that technology giants were eyeing the sector, forced the question of how a craft-based industry should respond to AI. Eric Nicolas, chief financial officer (CFO) and head of strategy, and Eric Saracchi, chief digital and information officer (CDIO) were charged with shaping that response. Rather than buy capability or partner externally, they chose to build in-house: d-lab, sited deliberately close to, while being organizationally distinct from EPFL's innovation park in Lausanne. The case follows d-lab from early experimentation to a string of commercial firsts: an AI-generated beef flavor launched in Asia in 2020, and an AI-created laundry fragrance in early 2021. Central to the lab's traction was a deliberate framing choice positioning AI as a creative co-pilot rather than a replacement and designed to win over skeptical, identity-invested experts whose value rested precisely on the knowledge AI now threatened to encode. By November 2021 d-lab had been named digital innovation of the year and had halved time-to-market while cutting formulation costs. The case closes on an unresolved strategic question facing Nicolas and Saracchi: how to move d-lab from proof of concept to durable advantage while deepening its integration with the wider organization, and extending its reach from formulation into molecular discovery. It offers a grounded vehicle for examining innovation-unit design, expert buy-in under AI disruption, and the governance of adjacent-but-separate digital capability.

What does a zero target measure? In 2016, Barry Callebaut launched Forever Chocolate with a pledge to eradicate child labor from its supply chain by 2025. For its 2021-22 financial year, the company reported over 25,000 cases of child labor identified and 2,844 remediated. In May 2023, it changed the target: By 2025, human rights due diligence would cover its entire cocoa supply chain and every identified case would be remediated. A Bittersweet Paradox: From Zero Child Labor to Human Rights Due Diligence uses this decision to examine how zero KPIs and impact metrics behave in practice. A zero KPI states an absolute ethical demand in a single number. That simplicity mobilizes action. It can also conceal the conditions that determine whether change lasts: persistent poverty in farming communities, limited access to education, and constraints that no single company can resolve alone. But Zero KPIs also set a measurement trap. Stronger monitoring uncovers more cases so improved visibility looks like deteriorating performance. A report of zero cases can say more about what an organization fails to see than about the children it has protected. The replacement metrics raise their own questions. Is abandoning zero child labor a retreat or an evolution in the sustainability strategy compliant with the new regulatory environment? Students work with the company's reported figures through the eyes of a sustainability manager, an investor, a child rights organization and a farmer cooperative, each reading the same evidence differently. The questions apply more broadly: to net zero emissions, zero workplace harm and zero discrimination. What exactly does 'zero' cover? Do incentives reward discovering problems? Who verifies that remediation lasts? Do indicators reveal progress or reward an attractive appearance of success?

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Holcim is a Swiss multinational company that manufactures cement and building materials. Excluding China, it is the top cement producer in the world. Holcim is also a top 50 CO2 emissions emitter. And it decisively put sustainability efforts front and center in its overall strategy. The case describes the integration of different sustainability initiatives into Holcim's overall strategy over more than a decade, a period during which the firm underwent massive transformations, including a merger with Lafarge, a major pivot from cement to construction materials, the sale of assets in key countries and a spin off of its North-American operations. The case pivots the discussion from the traditional question: 'What does Holcim do for sustainability?' to a more interesting one: 'What does sustainability do for Holcim?' It brings clarity to the different ways through which sustainability contributes to the firm's strategy: compliance, resilience and market advantage. Focusing on market advantage, it shows the vast repertoire of sustainability actions that can impact a firm's strategy and how sustainability can be leveraged to create value. It also reveals that not all sustainability actions are designed to have a sustainability impact.

André Hoffmann explores how leaders can build resilient businesses by putting nature, purpose, and long-term value at the heart of their decisions.

Sustainability reporting is now common among large companies. According to the OECD, firms representing 91% of global listed market capitalization disclose sustainability-related information. Yet we find that firms with strong reporting often assu...