Pollstar Live! Keynote Preview: From Big Tech To Box Office – AI’s Next Chapter In Live

Pollstar Live!, the world’s largest gathering of live entertainment professionals, returns to Los Angeles April 14-16 and will be held at Loews Hollywood Hotel. The three-day conference is a flagship event for Pollstar magazine with compelling keynotes, panels, roundtables and the Pollstar Awards, celebrating the best in the business, along with plenty of opportunities to network and engage in insightful discussions.

Pollstar Live! kicks off with Production Live!, the one-day companion conference that features panels on all topics related to staging live events, including lighting, video, stage management, sound technique, concert production, regulations, security and more.

Click these links for the Production Live! and the Pollstar Live! schedules. Register for Pollstar Live! here.

For a century or more, raccoon hunters and their quarry were in a constant state of competition. The wily, masked critter is smart and cunning and the hunters who sought them, having developed the distinctly American breeds of coon hound, were forever tweaking the traits in their pups.

The raccoons would get smarter, the hunters would improve the dogs. The raccoons would develop a new evasion strategy, the dogs would be bred to counter it. The dogs would catch a few more raccoons and the raccoons would come up with something new. 

Naturally, of course, the smarter and stronger raccoons would be the ones that survived to pass their genes on to the next generation, where the dogs would have to be tweaked again and, just as inevitably, the most successful coon hounds were the ones who’d be tasked with producing the next generation themselves.

And so it goes. Or so it went.

Both sides of the hunt have reached something of an evolutionary stasis. Various coon hound breeds are now shown at the major dog shows; as the blue tick and black and tan have stopped changing so frequently, a breed standard can be developed and judged at Westminster.

And the reason for that is, mostly, market forces. When fur fell out of fashion and Fess Parker stopped playing Davy Crockett on TV, the need to harvest so many raccoons disappeared. 

Coon hounds settled into the standard dog life of lounging around the house (or stalking the sidelines at University of Tennessee football games) and coon hunting largely became a competition where the point is simply to have the dogs get their prey up into a tree and his human handler marks a scorecard instead of cracking his shotgun.

And that serves as a metaphor for the present and future of ticketing in an increasingly AI-driven world. 

The bots doing the bidding of secondary sellers have dominated the space for years. The primary ticketers develop new tools to fight back. The secondary adapts. The primary responds. Prices skyrocket, the fan — still opening the wallet, of course — gets mad. The politicians load up their rhetorical cannons. Blustery executive orders are issued and the Senate holds hearings demanding simple answers to questions that are not so simple, and often depend on who is sitting on the other side of the question. 

In a Keynote Case Study presentation “From Big Tech to Box Office: AI’s Next Chapter in Live,” Ticketmaster’s Global President Saumil Mehta will lay out the tools artists can use to protect fan access, enforce artist intent and bring transparency back to ticketing. 

Mehta joined Ticketmaster in October succeeding Mark Yovich, who had been president since 2020 and is now Chairman of Ticketmaster. Mehta spent more than nine years at Square as Chief Product Officer and Head of Business Org helping build and scale products used by millions of small businesses and hundreds of millions of consumers. Prior to this role, Mehta founded LocBox, a marketing automation startup which was acquired by Square in 2015.

The case study will break down the products available, what’s changing, what’s coming and why tours are adopting a proactive approach to rein in scalpers.

The session will explore how AI playbooks proven in big tech are being applied to one of the most complex consumer marketplaces: live events. Drawing on his experience building AI products at a global scale, Mehta will unpack how these tools are reshaping ticket discovery, fraud prevention and the fan experience at Ticketmaster.

It’s perhaps too soon to say AI’s ubiquity has leveled the playing field but it’s allowed the artist, their teams and primary ticketing platforms to be more proactive after years of only being able to be reactive and that represents a fundamental and critical shift in the forever war between the two sides of the ticketing tête-à-tête, with the artist and primary now gaining ground instead of merely holding the line and mitigating inevitable losses.

And maybe, like the raccoon and the hound, a cultural (or regulatory) shift will create a stasis some day. In the meantime, the dogs are learning to hunt smarter.