Inside the Infrastructure: A Q&A with AUDIENCES CTO Irin Rahman
AUDIENCES’ CTO reflects on her first six months, the evolution of activation infrastructure and why independence and interoperability matter more than ever.
As AUDIENCES continues to scale its position as the independent leader in in-cloud data activation, the business has also continued to invest heavily in product and infrastructure leadership. One of the most significant additions over the past six months has been Irin Rahman joining as Chief Technology Officer.
Irin brings more than 14 years of experience spanning cloud architecture, AI innovation and large-scale data product development across some of the world’s leading marketing and technology organisations. Prior to joining AUDIENCES, she held senior transformation and leadership roles across WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Dentsu and Heineken, most recently serving as Chief Data, Technology & Product Officer at Wavemaker. She has also advised both the UK Government AI Council and the EU AI Council on data safety and applied AI propositions.
Since joining AUDIENCES, Irin has been focused on scaling the company’s infrastructure, expanding activation capabilities and helping shape the next phase of the platform as the market rapidly shifts towards privacy-first, cloud-native operating models.
At a time when the industry is undergoing major structural change from the rise of first-party data infrastructure to the recent acquisitions of LiveRamp and InfoSum, Irin’s perspective on where activation technology is heading feels especially timely.
In this Q&A, Irin reflects on her first six months at AUDIENCES, the infrastructure challenges brands are now facing, why in-cloud activation is becoming increasingly important, and where she believes intelligent signal distribution is heading next.
Q&A with Irin, CTO at AUDIENCES
Q. For those who may not know you yet, can you tell us a little about your background and what led you to join AUDIENCES?
I’ve spent the last 14 years working across data, cloud architecture, AI and product leadership, helping businesses modernise the way they use customer data. Before joining AUDIENCES, I worked across the WPP ecosystem, where I saw first-hand the growing gap between the amount of data brands collect and how little of it is actually operationalised within media and marketing. What attracted me to AUDIENCES was that the business had already solved a very real infrastructure problem the market is only now waking up to. The industry has spent years talking about first-party data, but AUDIENCES had built a genuinely scalable way to activate it directly within cloud environments, without the movement and duplication that traditional approaches rely on.
Q. What was it about AUDIENCES that stood out to you as a technology business?
The architecture. A lot of platforms in this space still rely on moving data into external environments before it can be activated. AUDIENCES took a fundamentally different approach by building activation infrastructure that operates directly within the customer’s own cloud environment. That changes a lot. It improves governance and privacy, but it also creates a much more scalable and efficient operating model for customers. As cloud adoption accelerates, that becomes increasingly important. I also believed strongly in the decision to remain independent and cloud agnostic. Customers do not want to be locked into a single ecosystem. They want interoperability and flexibility, and that is exactly where the market is heading.
Q. You’ve now been with the company for six months. What have been your biggest observations so far?
The maturity of the technology for a company at this stage has genuinely impressed me. The team has built a very strong technical foundation with clear product-market relevance. What’s exciting now is scaling that foundation further. We are expanding integrations, increasing automation and continuing to make activation faster and more intelligent for customers. I’ve also been struck by how aligned the business is. Product, engineering, commercial and customer teams are all moving towards the same goal, which is critical when you are building infrastructure technology. We have a weekly all hands which further helps everyone see where each department is at and how they can support any developments.
Q. From a product and engineering perspective, what have been your main areas of focus since joining?
A major focus has been scalability and extensibility. We are building infrastructure that needs to operate seamlessly across multiple cloud environments, activation endpoints and customer architectures, while maintaining very high standards around performance, governance and security. We’ve also focused heavily on connector expansion and orchestration capabilities. The future of this space is not just about audience creation, it’s about intelligent distribution and activation across increasingly fragmented ecosystems. At the same time, we are investing in the foundations required for AI-driven workflows and automation layers that will become increasingly important over the next few years.
Q. AUDIENCES talks a lot about “signal distribution infrastructure.” What does that mean in practice?
The industry has historically treated customer data activation as a workflow problem. We see it more as an infrastructure problem. Modern businesses have valuable customer signals sitting across cloud warehouses, CRM systems, publishers, clean rooms and activation platforms, but the ability to operationalise those signals quickly, securely and intelligently remains incredibly fragmented. AUDIENCES acts as the infrastructure layer that connects those environments and enables signals to move operationally into activation channels without unnecessary duplication or loss of control. That infrastructure layer becomes increasingly valuable as the ecosystem becomes more privacy-conscious and more complex.
Q. You have some exciting launches coming up, what does that represent from your perspective as CTO?
Without giving too much away, we have a very significant milestone approaching because it validates the direction the business has taken technically. The market is clearly moving towards in-cloud operating models, where applications are deployed directly within modern cloud ecosystems rather than sitting externally from them. Being able to operate natively is a strong reflection of where enterprise infrastructure is heading. Importantly, staying cloud agnostic. That independence matters because customers increasingly operate across multiple environments and want flexibility in how they build their data infrastructure.
Q. AI is dominating industry conversations right now. Where do you think it will have the biggest impact on activation technology?
AI will significantly accelerate operational decision-making across activation workflows. But the businesses that benefit most from AI will be the ones with strong underlying infrastructure and high-quality data governance already in place. Without that foundation, AI simply amplifies inefficiencies. What excites me is the opportunity to build more intelligent orchestration into the activation layer itself which helps businesses make faster, more adaptive decisions around audience distribution and optimisation in real time. We are still very early in that journey as an industry.
Q. What excites you most about the team and culture being built at AUDIENCES?
There’s a very strong builder mentality across the company. People here are ambitious and genuinely motivated by solving hard problems. This stems from the founders. What they have built is something we are all excited by. However, there’s also a willingness and encouragement to challenge legacy assumptions about how activation should work, which is incredibly important in a market that is going through structural change. For me personally, it’s exciting to be part of a business that is not just building another tool, but helping define a new category of infrastructure. It also helps we have a great team of people to do this alongside!
Q.. Looking ahead, what are you most excited about for the next 12 months at AUDIENCES?
The market timing feels incredibly strong. Brands, publishers and platforms are all trying to solve the same challenge: how to activate data more intelligently while maintaining privacy, governance and operational control. With recent acquisition of Live Ramp for Publicis and Infosum for WPP is a clear indication to how the market is heavily investing in data intelligence through changing data and technology architecture. The narrative is moving away from owning more data to distribution of information in the right places within the right time. That is exactly the purpose of AUDIENCES. Over the next 12 months, I’m excited about continuing to scale the platform, deepen ecosystem partnerships and further strengthen the technology foundations that position us for long-term growth. We’re building infrastructure for where the market is heading next, not where it has historically been."
