Ticketmaster Names Jim Freeman CTO, Expands AI and Product Leadership
Ticketmaster has named former Amazon executive Jim Freeman as its chief technology officer (CTO). The company has also hired two other senior leaders to focus on data science and product development. These changes come as Ticketmaster invests more in artificial intelligence (AI) and ticketing technology.
The company announced the appointments on Monday, Oct. 19. It named Rachel Smith as its first senior vice president of data science and machine learning, and Chuck Mortimore as senior vice president of product. Ticketmaster is also adding the team behind the startup Ragie.ai to expand its AI capabilities.
These appointments are part of a wider plan to strengthen Ticketmaster's engineering teams, make greater use of machine learning and develop new technology for fans, artists, venues and other ticketing clients.
“Reliable, secure and personalized experiences depend on how effectively we use technology and data,” said Saumil Mehta, Ticketmaster's global president.
Freeman has more than 30 years of experience leading engineering teams. He will oversee Ticketmaster's technology operations around the world and the development of new experiences for fans and clients. His responsibilities include improving the company's use of AI tools that can carry out tasks, bringing AI into more parts of its operations, and strengthening defenses against ticket-buying bots and other unauthorized activity.
Ticketmaster says it plans to make AI a central part of its work. Freeman will lead the company's move toward an approach that puts AI first across the organization.
Freeman previously held senior engineering leadership roles at Amazon. He helped build and launch Prime Video and later helped grow the streaming service to more than 30 million active users each month around the world. He also helped expand Prime Video's distribution and device partnerships and launch Prime Video Direct and Amazon Channels.
He later became chief technology officer at Zalando, a European online fashion marketplace that operates in 29 markets and serves more than 62 million active customers. Most recently, Freeman worked as a senior adviser at investment firm Permira.
Freeman is taking over a role that had been empty since February, when former Ticketmaster CTO Carlos Alvarez-Coch left the company, according to Variety.
Smith will lead Ticketmaster's data science and machine learning work in a newly created senior leadership role.
She will build a central data science team, expand the company's existing data analysis work and help the company use data more often when developing products and running its business.
Smith joins Ticketmaster from Block, where she helped build and grow data science teams that supported Square, Cash App and TIDAL. Ticketmaster said her experience building data teams for large consumer technology platforms will help it make greater use of data across its ticketing business.
Mortimore will lead product plans for identity, account access and trust. His focus will be on making it safer and easier for customers to access and manage their accounts and tickets.
His responsibilities include improving protection against people accessing accounts without permission and other security threats. He will also develop products to make managing tickets easier for customers.
Mortimore has more than 20 years of experience leading product teams, including at Disney, Stripe, Visa and Salesforce. Earlier in his career, he worked as an engineer at Netscape and Sun Microsystems.
Most recently, Mortimore led identity technology projects at Disney. He oversaw efforts to bring together identity systems across the company's worldwide operations, including its theme parks, Disney+ and Hulu.
Along with these leadership appointments, Ticketmaster is adding the team behind Ragie.ai, a company that specializes in the technology and systems AI needs to find and retrieve information.
Ragie announced in July that it was joining Ticketmaster. The startup developed technology that helps AI applications find, retrieve and use information from business data and documents.
Ticketmaster said the Ragie team will help develop AI tools and bring them into use across the company. The team will contribute its knowledge of the systems that support AI and help it find information.
These new investments build on technology projects already underway at Ticketmaster. The company has explained how it already uses AI to help people discover events, search for information, get customer support and buy tickets.
The company is also developing connections that will make event information and available tickets easier to find through conversational searches and AI-powered platforms.
The appointments come almost a year after Mehta was named Ticketmaster's global president. At that time, the company said speeding up its move toward AI was a priority under his leadership.
Ticketmaster's latest announcement did not say when customers could start using new AI tools that can carry out tasks on their own. It also did not name any specific products that the expanded technology leadership team is expected to develop.