Ticketmaster names ex-Amazon VP Jim Freeman as CTO to lead AI-first push
Ticketmaster has appointed former Amazon vice-president Jim Freeman as its chief technology officer to lead an AI-first rebuild of its technology.
The company announced the appointment on 19 October, alongside two other senior hires, Music Business Worldwide reported. The CTO post had been vacant since February, according to Variety.
Freeman will oversee Ticketmaster's global engineering organisation and a modernisation of its core platform. That is the underlying system that handles event listings, ticket sales, account management and entry.
He has also been tasked with making every function AI-first. In practice, that means wider use of artificial intelligence across internal work and customer-facing products, rather than adding it to one or two features.
Part of that brief covers a new generation of agentic, AI-powered tools. These are software assistants that can carry out multi-step tasks on a user's behalf, such as searching, comparing options or completing actions inside an app.
Freeman will also continue work on Ticketmaster's defences against bots and bad actors. Bots are automated programmes that can flood on-sales, grab tickets in bulk and drive fraud. Stopping them matters to fans because it affects queuing, pricing pressure and who gets into the venue.
Ticketmaster paired Freeman's arrival with two more appointments. Rachel Smith joins from Block as the company's first senior vice-president of data science and machine learning, the field that builds systems that learn from data to make predictions. She will build a centre of excellence for data science inside the company.
Chuck Mortimore, a former Disney executive, joins as senior vice-president of product. He will lead product strategy for identity, access and trust. That covers how fans prove who they are, how they get into events and how the company checks that tickets are genuine.
The company has also added the team behind AI startup Ragie. Ticketmaster did not disclose deal terms in the announcement.
For fans, this means the next changes to buying and using tickets may come from the back office first. Faster fraud detection, clearer identity checks and more automated help are the kinds of updates that show up as shorter queues and fewer failed orders, when they work.
