I’m a strategist who knows the code, and I write it when a strategy needs proving.
My whole career has been spent building new businesses out of what a company already owns. The names changed as the industry did: data, then identity, then retail media, now AI. The work underneath stayed the same.
Value first, then AI
I measure my time by how close it gets me 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 become the product once 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 while each keeps control of its own.
The interesting part was actually scaling it: the programmes, the rollout plan, getting everyone bought in globally. That’s the distance between a prototype and a product.
The distinction I draw 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 distinction I draw most weeks is between agentic AI and 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