Advisor. Speaker. Consultant. Builder. Change specialist.

From the world’s biggest brands to the frontier of AI and commerce: I’m turning nearly two decades of expertise as an insider and a disruptor into the tools you need to build what’s next.

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Kristina Kaganer

Where I’ve worked

  • AB InBev
  • Publicis Groupe
  • WPP
  • Omnicom
  • Coty

About.

Navigating the space between legacy & what’s next.

Kristina Kaganer on stage, microphone in hand, in conversation with the session host

Named The Full Stack Architect in 2026 by Performance Marketing World.

The insider

With nearly twenty years of experience inside global consumer brands and agency groups, I turn strategy into working businesses. I know how large organisations move and where they stall. I get results by organising teams around a clear objective, focusing on the alignment and clarity needed to ensure the work continues long after I have left.

The disruptor

I work at the intersection of AI and commerce, which are both gaps in traditional corporate planning. I help leadership teams anticipate the shift by building a concrete roadmap and identifying the same high-impact wins that the market will soon compete for. This allows them to move on their own terms. The goal isn’t a strategy document. It is a business that is ready.

The builder

I turn strategy into concrete work. I bridge the gap between AI and commerce by building the tools, the operating models and the teams required to actually run them. Strategy documents are a starting point, but they don’t generate revenue. The only way to move on your own terms is to own the infrastructure. I put the people and the processes in place so the company can execute on the high-impact wins the market will soon compete for. Velocity is the only real first-mover advantage.

Speaking.

  1. Tracking the sale

    Automation has made the path to purchase opaque. When the journey is fragmented, proving what actually influenced the sale is the hardest part of the work. I show how to solve for attribution in an automated world, and why the customer experience remains the only real lever.

    Sample topics

    • AI recommendations aren’t objective. Who decided?
    • What happens when the customer sends an agent?
    • How do you prove what actually influenced the sale?
    • Trust is the new attention. What moves the sale now?
    Get in touch
  2. What’s worth building?

    Most brands judge new technology by its potential, not its commercial value. I show leadership teams how to pressure-test their own pipelines before the build starts, what it costs to skip that step, and why the biggest brands usually do.

    Sample topics

    • How the assets you overlook create a new business.
    • Most AI pilots look designed to succeed but are set up to fail.
    • Product market fit starts before the product.
    • AI is not the value proposition. Delivering value is.
    Get in touch
  3. Commercial build

    Most people try to scale a prototype. They don’t realise that the process for building 0 to 10 is not the same process for 10 to 100. I show how to make that distinction and the steps to rebuild for scale. This is based on the work I built myself, not a slide deck of someone else’s results.

    Sample topics

    • Who needs an assistant when you can build one?
    • I wrote the code to prove the strategy.
    • 0 to 10 and 10 to 100 are different builds.
    • The prototype isn’t the interesting part. Scaling it is.
    Get in touch
  4. What happens when there’s no playbook?

    The most critical work has no precedent. I’ve spent my career building in frontier technology, where the map is blank and the tools change every six months. I show how to operate in that volatility: deciding before the data arrives, and writing the playbook as you go.

    Sample topics

    • The No Playbook Playbook. Rules for work nobody has done before.
    • How the decision actually gets made, from inside the room.
    • Every pivot is a communication problem first.
    • Leading through restructures and new roles.
    Get in touch

Formats: keynote · conference talk · panel · moderating · fireside chat · interview · workshop or board session · podcast

Past speaking highlights

  • Cannes Lions · 2026 · 0:31
    Retailers pooling their data into one network means one thing in practice: accessibility for the smaller brands.
  • ATS London · 2025 · 0:33
    Data products are built stacked, not in a line. The old cycle through twenty departments just doesn’t work at the speed you need.
  • IAB Europe · 2023 · 0:30
    Commerce media doesn’t talk enough about the retailer side of personalisation: connecting brands to segments they didn’t know they needed.

Select work.

  1. Publicis Groupe

    Publicis Warehouse

    Retail media was being bought run of site, with no link to what was actually selling. I joined clean room data to retail data and built an addressability product to target real-time sales, taking it from idea to prototype in four weeks. I then built the sales engine and product enablement, led the financial partnership pitches, and created a team that is still thriving today. I took the entire business from a concept to a live operation.

    Clean rooms and addressability

  2. AB InBev

    Save Pub Life

    When the pandemic closed pubs, AB InBev’s customers had no way to trade and no way to survive. I launched an award-winning B2B2C marketplace as the covid response programme in three weeks. The work wasn’t just the marketplace. It was the alignment of finance, control, and compliance to ensure bars were given matched funds in a timeframe that actually mattered. It was built on one insight: the problem was too big to answer globally, so the answer had to be built locally.

    Marketplace and crisis response

  3. Coty

    Shift

    Most people leading e-commerce grew up in traditional trade relationships, and the finances behind trade and retail media are completely different. I built an internal profitability engine that bridges finance, trade and retail media into one unified joint business plan.

    Joint business planning

  4. Clairol

    Clairol

    Most people think a brand relaunch is about moving forward. In the case of Nice ’n Easy, it actually alienated the core consumer, and new penetration didn’t make up for the loss. I built a user-centred activation to bring them back. I focused on the specifics that mattered to that audience, including large type and couponing. The look-alike modelling and identity product behind it had to be delivered through massive change management. That infrastructure became a programme that outlasted the activation.

    Identity and change management

Get in touch

Select writing.

  1. SheCanCode

    Career developmentJul 2026

    Unboxing the squiggly career

    Specialisation has a shrinking shelf life, and the value now sits in the white space between disciplines. A squiggly CV is a competitive edge.

    Read piece

I write to commission in any format: op-⁠eds, features, analysis, columns and reports on commerce media, data and AI.

Get in touch

Contact.

Planning an event, a project or a piece of writing? Book a call to talk it through, or send me the details below and I will come back to you.

Thank you.

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