Ticketmaster has appointed Jim Freeman, a former Amazon executive, as its chief technology officer, filling a position that had been vacant since February and putting artificial intelligence at the center of its technology strategy. The company confirmed the hire as it moves to counter automated bot attacks that have disrupted ticket sales for years.
Freeman joins Ticketmaster from Amazon, where he served as a vice president at Prime Video. His appointment follows the February departure of London-based chief technology officer Carlos Alvarez-Coch, who left the company ahead of a deposition. The vacancy had remained unfilled for roughly eight months before Freeman's arrival.
The ticketing giant described the hire as part of an «AI-first» approach to its operations. Ticketmaster has long faced criticism over bots that snap up tickets within seconds of going on sale, pushing inventory onto resale markets and frustrating ordinary fans. The company has argued that automated traffic is a persistent and evolving threat that requires equally sophisticated detection and prevention tools.
Freeman's background in large-scale consumer technology at Amazon is likely to shape how Ticketmaster builds those defenses. Prime Video operates one of the world's largest streaming platforms, a role that demands expertise in cloud infrastructure, data processing and machine learning at scale — capabilities that map directly onto the challenge of distinguishing human buyers from automated scripts during high-demand sales.
The appointment comes at a sensitive moment for Ticketmaster. The company has been under scrutiny from regulators, artists and fans over pricing, fees and access to tickets, and the bot problem has been a recurring theme in those complaints. An executive explicitly tasked with leading an AI-first agenda suggests the company intends to present technological investment as part of its answer to those concerns.
Ticketmaster has not disclosed specific details of the AI systems Freeman will oversee or a timeline for rolling out new measures. The company has previously deployed tools intended to verify that buyers are human and to flag suspicious purchasing patterns, but critics say such systems have not eliminated the problem.
For fans, the practical test will be whether the new leadership translates into smoother, fairer on-sale experiences. For Ticketmaster, the hire is a bet that machine learning can do what years of incremental fixes have not: keep automated buyers from overwhelming the primary market while legitimate customers try to secure seats.
Freeman's start date and the scope of his mandate beyond the AI-first framing were not immediately detailed. The company's choice of a former Amazon streaming executive, rather than someone from within the live-events industry, underscores how much of the ticketing business now depends on software infrastructure and data science.