Ed McLaughlin

So even if the agent goes rogue and tries to do something, you can say, no, you had a spending limit.

I sat down with MasterCard president and chief technology officer Ed McLaughlin to understand what happens when machines become participants in the global economy.

I'm Ruth Umo, and this is Fortune Next to Lead.

Ed McLaughlin, CTO and President of MasterCard.

Thank you so much for joining us on Fortune Next to Lead.

It's

So what I always love is what's the thing, what are the hard problems we could never solve before that we might have a chance to? We're doing a lot of research in quantum, right, because a lot of what we do are big, complex, multifactor combinatorial problems, right? That's what fraud detection, that's what network optimization, all of those things are.

So to have a brand-new type of compute that could solve it in a way you never could before, that's why you get into technology i don't think you get into technology unless you're a maker so these this whole idea of not how do you recreate what you've already done but how can you do things you could never do before solve hard problems that haven't been solved so i think the role of a mastercard role of any organization done right is while we'll never be pure research that constant hunger for applied research of saying what does this mean how can we do it and and just that drive to make things better we're going to have all kinds of new tools and capabilities that'll let us do that.