Ticketmaster has appointed former Amazon executive Jim Freeman as its Chief Technology Officer.
The Live Nation-owned company has also hired Rachel Smith from Block as its first SVP of Data Science and Machine Learning, and ex-Disney executive Chuck Mortimore as SVP of Product.
Ticketmaster announced the appointments on Monday (October 19), alongside the addition of the team behind AI startup Ragie.
“Reliable, secure and personalized experiences depend on how effectively we use technology and data,” said Saumil Mehta, Global President of Ticketmaster. “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.”
As CTO, Freeman will be responsible for the technology behind Ticketmaster’s products for fans and clients, including what the company calls “a new generation of agentic, AI-powered tools.”
“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.”
Saumil Mehta, Ticketmaster
Freeman will also oversee Ticketmaster’s global engineering organization and platform modernization, continue work on its defenses against bots and “bad actors,” and lead a push to make “every function AI-first” across the company.
Ticketmaster says Freeman has spent more than 30 years running engineering teams at consumer technology businesses.
As a VP at Amazon, he helped build and launch Prime Video, then scaled the service to more than 30 million monthly active users worldwide.
He also launched Prime Video Direct and Amazon Channels, and expanded the service’s device partnerships and distribution.
Freeman later served as CTO of European fashion marketplace Zalando, which now connects more than 62 million active customers with 7,000 brands across 29 markets.
Most recently, he was a Senior Advisor at Permira.
Freeman fills a position that had been vacant since February, according to Variety.
Ticketmaster’s previous CTO, London-based Carlos Alvarez-Coch, left shortly before the US antitrust trial against Live Nation began on March 2.
Smith joins Ticketmaster from Block, where she helped scale the data science teams behind Square, Cash App, and TIDAL.
She was responsible for more than 120 data scientists across those businesses.
At Ticketmaster, Smith will build what the company calls a “center of excellence for data science,” extending its existing analytics work and making data more central to product development and business decisions.
Ticketmaster says the move will create its first dedicated data science and machine learning organization, with a focus on fraud detection, bot mitigation, and the fan experience.
Mortimore, meanwhile, will lead Ticketmaster’s product strategy for identity, access, and trust.
His remit covers how fans access and manage their accounts and tickets, as well as protections against “bad actors and unauthorized access,” according to Ticketmaster.
Mortimore has held product leadership roles at Disney, Stripe, Visa, and Salesforce over more than 20 years, following earlier engineering roles at Netscape and Sun Microsystems.
At Disney, his most recent employer, he consolidated identity across the company’s global businesses, including its theme parks, Disney+, and Hulu.
Ticketmaster said the Ragie team, whose work focuses on AI infrastructure and retrieval technology, will help staff across the business build AI tools and put them to use.
Ragie announced on July 27 that it was joining Ticketmaster, a deal Variety reported as an acquisition.
Ragie‘s website still describes the company as a “fully managed RAG-as-a-Service platform,” and now carries a banner announcing that “Ragie joins Ticketmaster.” RAG, or retrieval-augmented generation, is a technique that lets AI models draw on a company’s own documents and data when generating answers.
The appointments come almost a year after Mehta joined Ticketmaster as Global President, with a stated aim to “accelerate an AI transformation” at the company.
Mehta previously spent more than nine years at Square, where he was most recently Chief Product Officer and Head of Business Org.
In May, Ticketmaster cut around 350 jobs, or 8% of its global workforce, primarily in engineering, product, and design, according to Pollstar.
“The purpose of [these cuts] is stronger prioritization, especially in engineering product and design,” Mehta told Pollstar at the time. “That comes with flattening layers, consolidating ownership, changing how teams are structured and ensuring that we put more energy behind specific initiatives.”
Ticketmaster’s controls on bots and ticket brokers are also the subject of a lawsuit brought against Live Nation and Ticketmaster by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and seven states in September 2025.
The complaint alleges that Ticketmaster knowingly allowed brokers to use hundreds or thousands of accounts to exceed artists’ ticket limits, and that those tickets were then resold on Ticketmaster’s own resale marketplace.
In a court filing on October 13, Live Nation and Ticketmaster denied the FTC’s claims, calling the lawsuit “misguided.”
“In 2025, Ticketmaster detected and blocked nearly 260 million attempts daily by bots to access its services, and currently blocks tens of thousands of suspected inauthentic account-creation attempts each day,” the filing states.
Separately, a federal jury in Manhattan found in April that Live Nation and Ticketmaster had illegally monopolized primary ticketing at major US concert venues, along with the market for large amphitheaters.
Live Nation and Ticketmaster have asked the court to throw out the verdict or order a new trial.
The coalition of 33 states and the District of Columbia that pressed the case to a verdict, after the DOJ settled its claims a week into the trial, is seeking the divestiture of Ticketmaster.
Ticketmaster‘s revenues rose 15% year-over-year to USD $852 million in Q2 2026, with adjusted operating income up 14% to USD $331 million.
The company says it processes more than 600 million tickets annually across more than 35 countries.Music Business Worldwide
