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Carol Juel has spent nearly a dozen years helping shape Synchrony Financial's evolution from a newly-independent consumer finance company into a technology-driven commerce platform.
Juel, who currently serves as executive vice president and chief technology and operating officer, joined the company ahead of its 2014 spinoff from General Electric. Synchrony Financial raised $2.9 billion, making it one of the largest IPOs that year.
Almost 12 years later, she is guiding the company through another shift: the rising prominence of artificial intelligence across the finance industry.
"We embarked on an effort in 2025 to identify strategic bets for Synchrony, leveraging a lot of the learnings that we had over the past few years, and looking at opportunities as to where we can really use it for the betterment of the company," Juel said in an interview. "That was a big part of my role last year, helping to lead the cross functional set of members of the management team to do the assessment of the opportunity areas."
The four key opportunities include agentic commerce, rethinking back-office operations, acceleration of merchant onboarding and using AI to anticipate risks faster.
Juel sees a particularly big opportunity in agentic commerce, fueled by consumers' changing shopping habits and AI adoption. Currently, Synchrony has 70 million customers across more than 400,000 merchants, according to Juel.
"As consumers, we're all learning how to prompt, we're all learning how to ask the right questions," she explains. "As consumers become more confident and comfortable with interacting with chat bots, there is this opportunity for you to get curated information across a host of retail environments because today search is very linear."
Juel's team recently added generative AI capabilities into Synchrony Marketplace, a shopping platform inside the MySynchrony app and website that logged nearly 300 million visits last year.
One new feature allows customers to describe a theme or aesthetic, for example a "living room inspired by Mad Men," and offers product recommendations from thousands of retailers.
At the same time, however, she is quick to caution against viewing AI as a cure-all for efficiency and growth. "No amount of generative AI is going to make a bad process better," she said.
Instead, Juel emphasizes what she calls a human-centered approach to AI deployment, noting that oversight and accountability must be a part of the automation.
"That's where we're saying it should be human-centric, meaning you have to insert human judgment in the right places," she said. "There are places where agentic AI will go from the right authority within a process to the end result, and then be reviewed in aggregate by someone responsible for the outcome."
Synchrony is also expanding its footprint in the broader digital commerce ecosystem. The company acquired consumer-financing software provider Versatile Credit in October, enabled Apple Pay checkout options for Synchrony Mastercard customers, partnered with Walmart and OnePay on a new credit card program embedded in the OnePay app, and joined Google's AP2 protocol initiative aimed at building secure payment standards for AI agents.
Juel has pushed to build company-wide AI fluency through job-specific training, including an internal AI field guide with real employee use cases and prompt examples.
Under Juel's leadership, the company also rolled out SynchronyGPT, an internal generative AI platform that allows employees to brainstorm, write, code and refine ideas while maintaining compliance standards.
However, she added, "you cannot outsource accountability to AI."
