Katerina Kirillova on Why Ticketing Fails at Decision Making | Interview

Ticketing no longer fails because of access, reach, or infrastructure. It fails because organizers lack a clear decision framework across fragmented data, audiences, and timing.

In this interview, XTIX founder Katerina Kirillova explains why ticketing needs to evolve from transaction systems into decision intelligence built around social behavior and real-world signals.

1. You’ve built ticketing platforms across multiple technology waves, from aggregation to blockchain and now AI. When did it become clear to you that the real bottleneck in ticketing wasn’t access or distribution, but decision-making itself?

​Katerina Kirillova: Over time, it became clear that the problem extends beyond decision-making itself. The primary issue in ticketing today is the fragmentation of data. Most organizers have to manage multiple ticketing systems, marketing tools, and external platforms. Sales occur in one place, analytics exist in another, and communication with audiences happens somewhere else entirely. As a result, organizers lack a complete view of what is actually happening with their audience.

Without clear data, making meaningful decisions is impossible. Access to inventory and strong artists is still important; a great artist often sells themselves. However, not every event sells out. If organizers don’t know how to work systematically with their audience — understanding behavior, social dynamics, and engagement — they can’t grow their businesses or take on bigger creative and commercial risks.

We recognize that the main issue in ticketing isn’t distribution. It’s the missing connection between data, audiences, and decisions.

2. Looking back at your work with TicketsCloud and Crypto.Tickets, what problems did those platforms solve well, and what frustrations remained unresolved that ultimately led to XTIX?

​Katerina Kirillova: TicketsCloud was created as a well-organized ticketing system that addressed scale and distribution at a system level. Its distribution layer was unique internationally at the time: ticket inventory was centralized, partners connected through an API, accessed quotas, and organizers could view sales performance across channels in a single interface. However, it still couldn’t address the bigger issue — how those data points translate into better decisions.

Crypto.Tickets looked at the problem differently. We focused on transparency and ownership: ticket history, controlled resale, and ways for organizers to benefit from secondary-market value. While the technology itself worked, the market wasn’t ready, and soon faced regulatory pressure around resale in many places. What became clear was not about resale — it was about what happens after the initial transaction and how little visibility organizers had into audience behavior beyond the purchase moment.

Those insights led to Vibe — not a marketplace or a checkout product, but a community layer around events. Vibe emphasized audience interaction and post-purchase behavior, allowing peer-to-peer resale through smart tickets in a trusted space and, more importantly, keeping organizers connected to their audience instead of losing that relationship after checkout.

XTIX combines these lessons. Its main goal is to close the gap between data, audience, and decisions. We are creating a product that helps organizers not only complete sales but also understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what to do next — all within one decision-making space.

Buying tickets — especially for concerts, festivals, and nightlife — is a social act. People don’t buy tickets alone; they buy in context, community, timing, and shared intent. Historically, ticketing systems have overlooked this layer entirely. XTIX is designed to make this social dynamic clear and actionable — not as a separate feature but as a vital part of how organizers can make better decisions and grow their businesses.

3. Many ticketing platforms focus on infrastructure, fees, or reach. Why did you decide to focus XTIX on pricing, promotion, and organizer decisions, arguably the hardest and most sensitive part of the workflow?

​Katerina Kirillova: I’d slightly reframe the question.

We’re not focused just on pricing or promotion. Our goal is to create an intelligent product that goes beyond a traditional ticketing system with a checkout button. XTIX is meant for organizers who think about audiences and long-term businesses, not just one-time events.

We aim to help organizers who want to:

• Build lasting relationships with their audiences.
• Scale sustainably.
• Market events more efficiently and cost-effectively.
• Gain clearer economic predictability.

To achieve this, infrastructure alone isn’t enough. You need a sales management layer based on how people actually decide to buy tickets. Very few platforms address this completely. There are discovery tools, marketing products, and ticketing systems, but almost no one constructs a full-cycle analytical framework that lets organizers manage the entire sales journey.

4. Event organizers still rely heavily on intuition when it comes to pricing and marketing. What are the core decision bottlenecks you see today that human teams struggle to handle consistently at scale?

​Katerina Kirillova: The biggest issue isn’t with intuition; the intuition can be quite strong in this particular sector. The issue with the intuition would be the fact that it cannot be scaled. Based on the information gathered, it appears that the organizers are left with three key decision bottlenecks.

First, the timing. Knowing when to take an action can be even more important than knowing what the action should be. It’s supremely important to understand when to increase prices, when to turn up marketing, when to pause, and when to pivot, and all of these understanding moments are based on very small, very fleeting signals, easily missed when the team is busy.

The second bottleneck is that of audience fragmentation. Most show organizers are still thinking in terms of this “average buyer,” while in fact, there is a whole set of behavioral segments – early adopters, so-called social Buyers, and last-minute decision-makers. This is something that a human would intellectually understand, but not find very simple to implement in practice.

The third bottleneck is that of cognitive overload. Even highly skilled organizations have difficulty making sense of hundreds of tiny signals happening simultaneously, such as changes in sales velocity, performance, external competition, and localized information. The resulting pressure tends to lead to reactive and risk-averse decision-making.

This means that organizers are not suffering from a lack of ideas; they lack a framework of understanding what is currently happening and what the important decisions are in the moment, and that is where intuition requires support, and not substitution, through systems.

5. XTIX positions its AI as a “Co-Pilot” rather than automation. What parts of ticketing should AI take over completely, and where should human judgment remain central?

​Katerina Kirillova: We see the AI Co-Pilot as a philosophy in itself. We don’t think that AI has any role in replacing human beings, let alone in events. The benefit lies in the combination of human experience and AI’s capacity to process complex tasks.

Concerts and festivals are not places that offer decision-making that is ever fixed or necessarily logical, since demand may suddenly change, artist popularity builds or wanes, and a number of social complications can enter, while small details in scheduling or costs can have long-term ramifications in terms of public trust. Such types of situations also harbor dangers in regard to complete automation.

Pattern recognition, anomaly detection, making comparisons between similar events or artists within markets, and modeling what happens in real time are all made easy for AI. But understanding the market in terms of branding, risk, relationships, or long-term positioning is beyond the capacity of AI.

Also, for this reason, we do not go for full autopilot mode. XTIX is meant to assist in a copilot fashion. The AI helps the organizer understand what’s going on and what the alternatives might be, while the organizer still remains in control.

However, at the same time, we recognize the dynamic nature of the system. Presently, XTIX does not have self-executing agents who operate independently. In future releases of the system, we propose to have AI agents that are able to perform defined and low-risk operations automatically. Even while automating, critical decision-making in the system remains under the control of the human.

6. AI systems in pricing often raise concerns about opacity and fairness. How do you design the XTIX AI Co-Pilot to be transparent and trusted rather than a black box optimizing revenue at any cost?

​Katerina Kirillova: Concerns about fairness and transparency in AI pricing are very real, especially in live events. Trust with the audience is fragile and can be easily lost.

We start with a simple idea: ticket pricing is not just about making money; it’s part of the relationship between an organizer and their audience. If pricing seems random or manipulative, people don’t just skip one event; they lose trust in the brand.

In live events, there are well-established pricing principles. Early supporters who buy tickets first take on the risk because they commit before knowing the demand. It’s fair that they receive early-bird pricing. As the event gets closer and uncertainty decreases, prices may go up. When pricing follows this understandable story, audiences see it as fair, even with price changes.

It’s also crucial that we are open about how decisions are made. For organizers, AI recommendations are clear. Signals, assumptions, and alternatives are visible.

7. Live events are shaped by messy, unpredictable signals like cultural trends, artist momentum, and local context. What has been most challenging about teaching AI to reason over these soft factors in real-world ticket sales?

​Katerina Kirillova: Ticket purchases are rarely made through rational thinking. They are influenced by cultural context, artist popularity, social dynamics, and local feelings. These factors are tough to outline because they go beyond data; they involve meaning.

We are just starting to learn how to model these dynamics. Big tech knows online behavior well, but offline life — decisions about real-world experiences — has not been studied much.

At XTIX, we are trying to create offline behavioral graphs to better connect the right events with the right audiences. If we do this successfully, it could change how people discover events for both organizers and fans.

8. Your platform operates across more than 120 countries. How does global diversity in audience behavior change the way you train and deploy AI compared to a single-market ticketing system?

​Katerina Kirillova: XTIX is designed as a global platform, but right now, we can only onboard clients in certain areas because of payment licensing. For us, global scale doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere. It means being flexible. Cultural context, audience behavior, and decision-making vary greatly across different markets. Instead of imposing a single model, we want to create systems that learn from local conditions while being built on a shared global structure.

9. Do you see the XTIX AI Co-Pilot primarily as a power tool for experienced organizers, or as a way for smaller or first-time organizers to compete with established players?

​Katerina Kirillova: XTIX isn’t based on the size or experience of the organizer; it focuses on mindset. For new or small organizers, the entry barrier is purposely low. Registration takes just a few minutes, and within half an hour, they can publish an event and start selling tickets, without needing any ticketing or marketing skills. Built-in social and community features allow organizers to drive sales through their existing audience without using paid marketing. For experienced organizers, XTIX helps expand their expertise while maintaining decision quality as their business grows. In both scenarios, AI doesn’t replace judgment. Instead, it eliminates unnecessary complexity and supports more confident decisions.

10. Looking back across TicketsCloud, Crypto.Tickets, and now XTIX, what was a belief you held with high conviction early on that you later had to completely unlearn?

​Katerina Kirillova: For a long time, I had a wrong idea that building a great product would first create its own market and sell itself there. Building strong technology, design, and an understanding of what makes a great product would, in my opinion, organically appeal to buyers in the market. Yet, in the ticketing industry, it’s one of the most deceiving assumptions one can hold. A software industry, such as Slack or Notion, has a use case where it’s adopted by individuals or businesses, whereas it’s not the case for ticketing, where one must necessarily stake their own claim in order to build some level of credibility in it. We’re not creating products such as Slack or Notion, where things can organically spread in businesses or among individuals, for example, from IT or any industry experts, or folks who love discovery or network enthusiasts, among other possible reasons for adoption. The ticketing industry, on the other hand, is one where all your end-users must, in all practical matters, appeal to your understanding of their “everyday,” which in turn has to closely align with your own understanding thereof, or in simpler words, where your grasp on their “everyday,” or understanding, has to remain spot on, while in any respect not necessarily bearing any predictive power towards what their or your own “tomorrow” would look like in its own right,

You deal with challenges one step at a time; you deal with real-life, complex problems such as pricing difficulties, market uncertainty, audience division, trust problems, and risk. The thing that I had to move away from was that sophistication and accuracy were all that I needed. Improvement for the ticketing market comes from being involved with clients routinely, being appealing, adaptable, and building relationships. This is not what products do; they simply make it all better if it’s based on real problems.

11. What was the most costly decision you made in your earlier ventures, not in hindsight but at the moment it was made, and how does that experience shape how you make decisions at XTIX today?

​Katerina Kirillova: Crypto.The tickets were expensive, owing to the fact that it seemed to be 100% correct at the time. We truly believed that the market desired radical transparency: complete ticket history, on-chain ownership, insight into resale, and increased control via blockchain technology. From a technological and ideological standpoint, everything made perfect sense. We were certain that transparency was a value in itself. We failed to recognize a much simpler reality. The majority of people wanted better experiences rather than complete transparency. Over time, the signal became clear. While blockchain-based tickets did not take off, another product we developed alongside them did.

Participation increased dramatically after we launched community engagement features. This evolution of our product resulted in Vibe, our central hub for community interaction.

The irony was significant. The concept of blockchain tickets did not resonate with users, but smart tickets, which are simple to use, reliable, and user-friendly, did. This was because the tickets promoted social interactions, peer-to-peer exchanges, and a sense of community.

This experience fundamentally altered my perspective on product development. Innovative ideas and sophisticated technology alone are insufficient. It is critical to constantly check whether the issues you are addressing are ones that the market is genuinely concerned about.

At XTIX, this lesson is critical. We pay much more attention to the behaviors of organizers and audiences rather than just what looks logical. Furthermore, we view every strategy as one that has to justify its existence with genuine signals rather than just beliefs.

12. Looking ahead to 2030, does success for XTIX mean building the smartest ticketing product, or becoming an intelligence layer the global events industry quietly depends on?

Katerina Kirillova: XTIX should be a product with an embedded intelligence layer, a framework for decision-making in the live-events industry. It also needs to be something people truly care about. We work in an offline industry focused on real experiences and emotions. We have great respect for the organizers who create those experiences, and we want their businesses to grow sustainably. If by 2030 XTIX becomes a trusted, nearly invisible foundation for better decisions while staying human-centered and closely tied to the industry, that will be real success.

Editor’s Note

This interview argues that the future of ticketing is not better distribution, but systems that help organizers reason under uncertainty rather than rely on intuition alone.