Pollstar Live! 2026 Keynote: From Big Tech To Box Office – AI’s Next Chapter In Live With Saumil Mehta Of Ticketmaster

While some businesses are fearful of artificial intelligence and work to limit its use, others are embracing it and aim to disrupt entire industries.

Ticketmaster is one of those looking to shake up the ticketing world, and Saumil Mehta, the company’s current president, gave Pollstar Live! attendees an exclusive preview of what consumers can expect from the major ticketer.

Mehta, who left his tech job at Square to join Ticketmaster last October, said the company has ramped up its AI efforts to “meet fans where they are” and optimize the ticket-buying experience.

He hosted a 30-minute presentation April 15 at Loews Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles that explored the challenges the company has faced as the live business boomed post-COVID shutdowns, and how their investments in AI can help fans access the tickets they want more efficiently.

The Ticketmaster executive sees AI as a “new utility” similar to electricity, one that changes how consumers buy, how organizations function, the way societies operate, and what they value.

Mehta admits he’s a “technologist” and “not an entertainment insider,” but he sees commonalities in the thought processes of Square, a company that helps businesses of all sizes process payments with its point-of-sale systems, and Ticketmaster.

“What I learned over the last 10 years which I’m trying to apply to Ticketmaster is how to engage with commerce at scale, how to move billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions all over the world between buyers and sellers, how to fight bad actors, fraud … and, most importantly, how to take a technology-first approach to problem solving, especially in the age of AI,” Mehta said.

He quickly learned that the ticketing marketplace is unlike any other in the world and saw how a recent onsale spiked the site’s traffic 150 times more than usual.

“That’s not 150%. That’s huge. You learn this stuff in computer science textbooks,” Mehta said. “It’s called the thundering herd problem, and you go 20 years in your career never seeing it in real life until I came here. How do you build a system that actually can accommodate a traffic spike that looks like this, and it happens three times a week?”

It’s not an easy task when the inventory is fixed, and only so many tickets are available, and what makes the live ticketing unique is that there are high emotional stakes tied to a purchase.

“We believe that AI can be transformative in all of these dimensions and more,” said Mehta, who added that Ticketmaster is only scratching the surface.

It’s only been less than four years since ChatGPT launched, but consumer habits have changed in that short period. About 900 million consumers a week use the AI chatbot and hundreds of millions more use others like Gemini and Claude.

The relationship between consumers and chatbots is growing, and there is a trend toward sales starting with a simple request via a chatbot rather than Google.

Ticketmaster invested in advertising within ChatGPT to go deeper into the ecosystem of the AI software’s ecosystem and developed an app for the chatbot’s app store that can connect fans to a concert in a specific region with a specific price point—all done with a simple request.

“We’re seeing that when consumers start on a chatbot, they have an even better experience than they have on a traditional search engine like Google,” Mehta said. “…Unlike what we’ve been trained to do over the last 20 years, which is to talk in this weird keyboard language that Google understands, now you can talk to the chatbot like you talk to a friend. And that makes your query, your search much more expressive, makes it much more expansive and makes it much more responsive.”

A video demonstrated the simple search of tickets using the chatbot, showing how official Ticketmaster listings showed up following the request and how one tap can lead to a selection of tickets in a specific area of the venue, and another tap can confirm purchase. Mehta notes this was “fundamentally impossible” three years ago.

“We are at the forefront of this evolution to ensure that consumers on behalf of our clients find Ticketmaster listings first,” Mehta said.

Ticketmaster’s efforts aren’t only on chatbots. Mehta assured conference attendees that they’re thinking about all consumers, including those who use the Ticketmaster app on their smartphones and the website.

The company plans to incorporate an AI agent into that app and website, allowing users to interact with it by asking questions and making requests, including the ability to switch the conversation to another device, such as via text message.

AI will also be essential to combat bots on the site. Mehta says Ticketmaster blocks 20 billion bots every month, and the plan is to invest more in that area to strengthen Ticketmaster’s defenses against bad actors and fight them with greater precision.

“We have AI tools; so do the bad guys,” Mehta said. “So, we are going to be in an absolute arms race against the bad guys, and we’re going to use AI even more than we already do to keep them at bay.”

He added that actual human scalpers are also a problem, and one way to deter them is to add verification steps that include ID and selfie checks ahead of a sale to verify fans.

Mehta acknowledged that AI use can rightly be a cause for concern for many consumers, but he said that Ticketmaster wants “to be clear and upfront about our responsible AI commitments and about the guardrails” it has set for itself.

“We’re all here to enhance the magic of live,” Mehta assured. “AI is not a replacement for what we all know and love, which is the magic of going to a show, experiencing an artist that we’ve been dreaming of seeing for the past 15 years. AI is not going to replace that. In fact, it’s going to make the value of live entertainment that much more important because in a world where everything is overrun with digital or AI slop, the thing that becomes more valuable is … to put fans in front of artists and artists in front of fans.”