Ticketmaster Hires Ex-Amazon Exec as CTO in All-In AI Push

Ticketmaster has named former Amazon executive Jim Freeman as chief technology officer, filling a vacancy left open since February and pairing the appointment with the company's most concentrated AI hiring push to date.

The vacancy itself is part of the story. The previous CTO, London-based Carlos Alvarez-Coch, departed ahead of a deposition in the U.S. government's antitrust trial against Ticketmaster's parent company, Live Nation. Ticketmaster has not said whether the two events are connected; the timing, however, is on the record.

The new hires run deeper than one seat. Rachel Smith, a veteran of Block — the payments company that owns the music service Tidal — becomes Ticketmaster's first senior vice president of data science and machine learning. Chuck Mortimore, who held product roles at Disney and Stripe, joins as senior vice president of product. The company also brought on the team from Raige.ai, an AI startup it acquired in July, to accelerate AI adoption and build out the platform's AI infrastructure.

"Reliable, secure and personalized experiences depend on how effectively we use technology and data," Ticketmaster's global president, Saumil Mehta, said in a statement. "Jim, Rachel, Chuck and the Ragie.ai team will help us move faster, build better tools and deliver better outcomes for fans, artists, venues and clients."

Notably, Mehta's statement names "Ragie.ai" while the company's own acquisition announcement identified the startup as Raige.ai. Neither side has clarified the discrepancy.

Why bots are driving the shake-up

Bot attacks have plagued Ticketmaster for years, and the company frames the executive overhaul as its answer. Freeman's remit covers AI end to end: building AI tools, powering fan experiences with the technology and pushing its adoption across the organization. Mortimore's product strategy brief explicitly targets the bot problem and aims to give fans easier access to their accounts and tickets. Smith will tighten the integration between data and broader product development.

The promises are broad. So far, Ticketmaster has named no specific product, no launch date and no metric by which the bot crackdown will be measured. Whether AI infrastructure translates into fewer scalped tickets is precisely the kind of claim that only results can settle.

What does this change for fans?

In the short term, nothing visible. The hires are structural: leadership, data pipelines, product strategy. The concrete near-term consequence is that Ticketmaster now has a full CTO bench for the first time since February, plus a dedicated data science executive it has never had before. Any change in how fans actually buy tickets — fewer bot snipes, smoother account access — depends on tools these executives have not yet shipped.

Freeman arrives from a stint as senior adviser at the private equity firm Permira. Before that, he served as a vice president at Amazon, where he built and launched Prime Video along with its device and distribution partnerships. That background is delivery-oriented, not research-oriented, which fits a company buying AI capability to fix an operational problem rather than to invent one.

The antitrust trial against Live Nation remains the louder story surrounding Ticketmaster. These hires position the company to argue, in public, that it is modernizing on its own initiative — though no one at Ticketmaster has framed it that way, and the court, not the CTO suite, will decide the larger question.