Kristina Kaganer

I built the products underneath commerce media and AI.

Kristina Kaganer, head and shoulders.

My talks start from inside the build and end with who pays for it.

Bring me the date and what the audience is already arguing about, and I’ll tell you which of these four it should be. If the brief is a keynote on why AI matters, I’m the wrong speaker.

Bio

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. I’ve worked brand side at Coty and AB InBev and agency side at Publicis Media, where I was Head of Data and Measurement and retail media products.

At Publicis Media I conceived Publicis Warehouse, which connects retailer data to a brand’s own customer data. It went from idea to prototype in four weeks, I wrote the code, and it is still running. I built the clean-room framework alongside it, so a brand and a retailer can work on each other’s data without handing it over.

Before that I was at Coty, where I rearchitected ecommerce growth, and at AB InBev, where I launched the covid response programme. That was Save Pub Life, a marketplace that put pubs and their customers on one platform, live in three weeks. It won a PRWeek award and a One Show Merit in 2021, and Performance Marketing World put me on its 2026 Powerlist as a Full Stack Fortifier.

I’m a strategist who knows the code, and I write it when a strategy needs proving. On a stage that means I can tell an audience what a thing cost to build and whose budget line paid for it.

Topics

  • Agentic commerce and what it breaks

    Agentic AI isn’t the same thing as automation, and most of commerce media, advertising sold on what a business knows about its customers, was built on the assumption that a person is doing the shopping.

    An agent-mediated purchase breaks each layer for a different reason. Identity graphs resolve devices to people, and an agent isn’t one. Agent traffic that declares itself is filtered as general invalid traffic under the MRC Invalid Traffic Detection and Filtration Guidelines. Clean rooms match first-party data about people, and on-site retail media inventory assumes a shopper who browses.

  • Who actually pays for commerce media

    Commerce media sits between two budgets that were never designed to talk to each other, and it stays a buzzword until someone owns the budget line.

    Trade spend is negotiated annually with the retailer under trade terms. Media spend is optimised weekly against ROAS. An agent-mediated purchase draws on both and reports to neither.

  • Building AI products in public

    Most founders I talk to can’t tell me whether they’ve built agents or just very good automation. I build in public, and I say which one I’ve built.

    The talk separates the model’s planning loop from the deterministic tools it calls, and covers how each is evaluated and what inference costs per task before the product gets a price.

  • What it costs to build a category

    The prototype isn’t the interesting part of building a category. Getting a whole organisation to sell something it has never sold before is.

    For retail media that meant a consented first-party data set, an identity layer that resolves shoppers across on-site and off-site inventory, clean-room access for brand partners, and measurement buyers accept. The IAB and MRC Retail Media Measurement Guidelines now set out what that measurement has to meet.

Select past opportunities

  1. 2026

    Experian content studio, Cannes Lions

    Interview

    What commerce media can see beyond a single retailer

  2. 2026

    pubX at Cannes

    Fireside chat

    Lunch session with Tom Triscari, Landmark Ventures

  3. 2026

    The ADOTAT Show with Pesach Lattin

    Podcast · guest

    Why the best marketing AI won’t be built by engineers

  4. 2025

    ATS London, ExchangeWire

    Panel

    Real-time data and the evolution of the marketer data tech stack

  5. 2023

    IAB Europe Industry Insider with PubMatic

    Webinar panel

    The evolution of commerce media in Europe

And more.

Booking

Formats
Keynote, conference talk, panel, moderating, fireside chat, interview, workshop or board session, podcast.
Download the profile (PDF)

Contact

Tell me what you’re stuck on

Or write to kristina@kristinakaganer.com