Mara is an
AI-Savvy Humanist

As a pioneering architect of AI experiences, Mara focuses on designing and building innovative intelligent systems that create meaningful and transformative experiences for people and organizations.

The road to AI Experience: Mara's Career Journey

Mara is Vice President of Agentic Experience Strategy at Mastercard, based in London. She created this role in response to the need for a new discipline focused on the design and deployment of agentic experiences.

She is author of two books on data and AI and a thought leader in the AI domain.

Mara's work reimagines AI not as merely a engine to integrate into products, but as a catalyst of new experiences —ones touching all the aspect of human life from attention to agency, delegation, and communication. Intelligence for Mara becomes a natural extension of how people think, behave, and interact with the world.

Through her expertise in data science, human-centered AI, and strategy, Mara has envisioned and built AI flagship solutions and practices at McKinsey QuantumBlack and IBM.

Mara serves on the advisory boards of the AI Summit London, The AI Awards, and the UKAI Agentic AI Working Group

In 2025, Mara has been nominated among the finalists of the Alan Turing AI Innovator award as part of the AI National Awards 2025; In 2024, Mara has been recognized among the Top 10 AI Leaders in the UK and Europe and Top 10 most influencial women in AI in the UK and Europe.

Mara was profiled as an Inspirational Women in Tech by WeAreTechWomen magazine, and featured as a role model in AI by McKinsey & Company in the series Humans Behind AI.

A humanistic approach to AI adoption

At Mastercard, Mara brings her vision and expertise on AI experience to the core payment products —where she uses AI to redesign the next generation of the payment experience: adaptive, safe, and tailored to people’s own context and needs.

At McKinsey QuantumBlack, Mara led the design and development of AI solutions and advised global clients on AI deployment, safety, and governance across industries from banking to pharma to telecom. As a Fellow of McKinsey’s Technology Council, she also led advanced R&D projects on AI explainability and agent.

Prior to that, she headed AI strategy for the Chief AI Officer at IBM, building enterprise-wide capabilities to scale the adoption of AI products like Watson and where she developed the organization’s first data storytelling practice. After starting as a data journalist with the IBM Data Science and AI Elite team, her mission expanded and evolved into leading the AI Strategy. Having identified a gap between people needs, business intents, and AI, Mara developed a well-defined framework for AI strategy for C-suite executives to unleash their business's full potential by uncovering innovative use cases through the lens of users' and customers' problems.

Being on client-facing roles for years in the AI industry, Mara has worked with a variety of clients such as: Lufthansa, Lloyds, Altice Group, Rolls Royce, James Fisher & Sons, ABC Bank, Salesforce among many.

Mara's impact on the tech industry, be it at Mastercard, McKinsey or IBM, has reflected on these organizations and their clients' culture and innovation.

Yet, her career began in data journalism, grounding her in the rigor of data science and coding and the power of narrative—an early foundation for her focus on human-centered AI.

The frenzy of new AI and generative AI technologies, like agentic systems, has brought excitement around AI potential. Yet, organizations still struggle with activation, deployment, and risk governance. Mara adopts human-centered methods she developed to help organizations overcome these three challenges.

By witnessing the evolution of AI, from its early adoption, Mara realized that we need to outgrow the merely technical conversations around this technology and frame them as a quest around the problems AI can solve for people, along with its implications. For Mara, human beings should become the pivot of AI to trigger a cultural shift in a world driven by mechanical processes —mostly black boxes— that people don't know how to question and interpret. Humanising AI involves applying AI with a purpose where it matters to people.

Mara's unique approach to AI is rooted in data journalism

Mara received a Bachelor's Degree in Classics and a Master's Degree in Linguistics with an emphasis on data design at the University of Milan, where she graduated Summa cum Laude. Yet, by training, Mara's background is in data journalism. In fact, besides being trained as a humanist, she is also a self-taught coder.

Mara started her professional career at Accurat, a data-driven design innovation agency co-founded by Data Designer and Partner at Pentagram Giorgia Lupi.

Following that experience, Mara won a scholarship at the University of Southern California, where she earned a second master's degree in Data Journalism and built her own curriculum at the intersection of computer science and journalism.

During her time as a data journalist, she worked with major design agencies and newsrooms, like Pentagram —where she was part of Gioggia Lupi's team for the data-driven fashion collection commissioned by &OtherStories, Esquire Magazine —where she published a data story around Covid-19 data, and Al Jazeera's Doha Hub.

Mara is an author and a prominent voice advocating for human-centered AI

Mara has had two books published to date exploring how to weave a humanistic approach into the design and developing practices using data and AI:

Artificial Humans: For a humanistic approach to algorithms —Umani Artificiali— published December 2022 in Milan

How to Communicate with Data — Come comunicare con i dati— published May 2018 in Milan.

Mara’s mission is to move the conversation on AI and our culture forward

Mara's work and research around AI have seen her speaking at numerous events and institutions, including the World AI Cannes Festival, The New York AI Summit, the Women in Tech event organized by the London Tech Week, and the Responsible AI Summit in Cambridge.

Alongside her public speaking appearances, Mara has also been an AI strategy instructor at the London School of Economics for the AI Journalism Academy, sponsored by Google News Lab.

These opportunities don't solely focus on public events. Mara's work, publications, and research at such a young age has seen her invited to speak about her point of view on AI and her inspirational and unique career path as a lecturer at the Royal College of Arts in London, Bologna Business School in Bologna, The Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, University of California in Santa Barbara, and LUMSA University in Rome.

Awards and Recognitions

In 2024 Mara has been recognized among the Top 10 AI leaders in the UK and Europe and Top 10 most influencial women in AI in the UK and Europe.

She was profiled as an Inspirational Women in Tech by WeAreTechWomen magazine. She was also featured as a role model in AI by McKinsey & Company as part of the series Humans Behind AI.

Mara has already won several awards during her career. In 2017, she won the Thomas Campbell Jackson and Pamela Brandt Jackson Award in Science & Technology, and the Virginia Middleton Endowed Journalism Scholarships Award.

She won IBM's Top Performer Award in 2021 and was nominated among the Recognition Experience honourees. That same year, she also won an award for IBM innovation.

Mara is an AI-Savvy Humanist