Ticketmaster executives (Credits: Variety)
Ticketmaster is betting big on artificial intelligence to fix its most notorious problem: bots. The ticketing giant has hired Jim Freeman, a former Amazon executive, as its new chief technology officer, part of a sweeping executive shake-up aimed at going all-in on AI.
The CTO role had sat vacant since February, when London-based chief technology officer Carlos Alvarez-Coch departed ahead of a deposition in the U.S. government’s antitrust trial against parent company Live Nation. Freeman’s arrival signals Ticketmaster wants proven big-tech firepower to modernize its systems.
Bot attacks meet machine learning
Bot attacks have plagued Ticketmaster for years, turning major on-sales into chaotic races where real fans routinely lose out to automated resellers. The new leadership bench is clearly built to fight that war. Alongside Freeman, the company appointed Rachel Smith — a veteran of Block, the company behind music service Tidal — as its first-ever senior vice president of data science and machine learning.
Smith’s title alone tells the story: Ticketmaster is institutionalizing AI and ML at the senior level, likely to power smarter bot detection, fraud prevention, and demand forecasting at on-sale time.
A product rebuild is coming too
The shake-up extends beyond AI talent. Chuck Mortimore, a product veteran of Disney and Stripe, joins as the next senior vice president of product. With payments experience from Stripe and consumer-product chops from Disney, his hire suggests Ticketmaster is serious about rethinking how fans actually buy tickets — not just policing the bots.
Between an ex-Amazon CTO, a first-ever ML chief, and a Stripe-seasoned product lead, Ticketmaster’s message is clear: the fix for its years of on-sale chaos will be technological, not just legal. Whether fans feel the difference at the next big drop remains the real test.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
