I’m a strategist who knows the code, and I write it when a strategy needs proving.
My whole career has been spent building businesses out of what a company already owns but doesn’t sell. The names changed as the industry did: data, then identity, then retail media, now AI. The job underneath stayed the same.
Value first, not AI first
I don’t care how much time I spend on something. I care how close I am to the goal and how efficiently I got there.
I start with what a business already owns and build the smallest version that shows someone will pay for it.
In 2020 I was Head of Data for Europe at AB InBev, where Save Pub Life went live in three weeks. It was a marketplace that put pubs and their customers on one platform, and it went on to win a PRWeek award and a One Show Merit.
Retail media is the clearest case of the pattern
A retailer’s shopper data and its traffic aren’t the product until somebody works out how to sell them. At Publicis Media I conceived Publicis Warehouse, which connects retail data to a brand’s own customer data so the brand can reach people who’ve bought the product or want to. A client commissioned me to solve one problem and it turned into a product. I also built the clean-room framework, which lets brands and retailers work on each other’s data without handing it over.
The prototype isn’t the interesting part. Scaling it was: the programmes, the rollout plan, getting everyone bought in globally. That’s the distance between a prototype and a product.
The correction I make most weeks
From November 2025 to September 2026 I was Chief Product and Technology Officer at Navigator, a travel data marketplace where software agents do the media buying. The correction I make most weeks is that agentic AI is not the same thing as automation. Think of the agent as the brain and the tools as the hands. Now I’m independent, and I work on commerce media and AI.
My CV looks less like a ladder and more like modern art
It used to be confusing. Now it’s the reason I get hired. I’ve worked brand side at Coty and AB InBev and agency side at Publicis Media.
Identity came early. From 2016 to 2018 I was Director of Global Data Strategy at Coty, and identity was the whole job there: who is this person, across which websites and apps, and can you prove it well enough to trade on it.
Contact
Or write to kristina@kristinakaganer.com