Ticketmaster Global President Saumil Mehta Honored for Industry Impact

SAUMIL MEHTA Global President Ticketmaster

BY THE NUMBER: 20 billion. The number of bots Ticketmaster blocks every month, Mehta said at Pollstar Live! during a keynote panel. MENTORS: “Cheesy but true: mom and dad. They taught me ambition, resilience, high standards, work ethic and risk-taking.”

While a passion for music is always a plus when working in the live entertainment industry, it’s refreshing to have an outsider’s perspective on the business, looking at the operation and simply questioning how it works and why.

Saumil Mehta, president of Ticketmaster, left his tech job at Square to join the major ticketer and quickly looked to improve the fans’ relationship with technology, specifically AI.

“I came from payments where the obsession is always: how do you reduce the distance between intent and transaction? What I have found in live is that AI is compressing that distance in ways that were not possible even three years ago — and doing it on both sides of the equation at once,” Mehta tells Pollstar. “For fans, the experience of finding and buying a ticket is becoming more conversational, more human. For the industry, the same tools are helping identify bots, reduce fraud and protect access for real fans.”

He admittedly sees himself as a technologist and not an entertainment insider, and additional bodies won’t be enough to combat bad actors and fraud in the ticketing biz.

“We’re also operating in an environment where sophisticated bad actors are constantly trying to get between fans and tickets,” Mehta says. “The way to beat them is with better technology and better data, applied faster than they can adapt. That is where we are putting our resources.

“The thing I keep coming back to is the pace of my own team. People are building in days what used to take quarters,” Mehta adds. “They see a problem and reach for a tool. That instinct is spreading. The organizations that scale it, alongside the appetite to adopt what works, are going to be very hard to compete with. We are building for both.”

Ticketmaster is also just keeping up with the growing appetite for live music, and Mehta doesn’t believe it will wane.

“[Blue dot fever is] a catchy term, but it’s not backed by facts,” he says. “The fundamentals of live are strong. Record-setting moments like Bruno Mars’ onsale don’t happen in a weak market.”

Pollstar’s 2026 Impact 50 Hub

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/06/22/2026-impact-50-honoree-saumil-mehta/)._