Rokt, the leading ecommerce technology company using machine learning and AI to make transactions more relevant to each shopper, announced the appointment of Bill Barton as Chief Operating Officer. Barton’s appointment follows his tenure as Rokt’s Chief Product and Engineering Officer, as well as a strategic advisor to the company. His new role reflects both his technical roots and a growing belief that AI has made organizational development itself a deeply technical discipline.
As COO, Barton will lead three functions: People, Security and Legal. The People function will for the first time bring together talent acquisition, people operations, employment legal, and people business partners under unified leadership. Security and Legal round out a portfolio designed around how Rokt attracts and develops talent, protects what it builds, and manages risk at pace.
Barton will also continue leading Rokt’s Swarm initiative, a cross-functional group of builders working across the company’s highest-priority product development programs as part of Rokt’s push toward a flatter, more nimble engineering organization.
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“Over the past decade I’ve become increasingly focused on how you actually scale a team’s potential through culture, organization design, and removing the barriers that slow people down,” Barton said. “AI is making that work fundamentally more technical. The question of how you build an organization that fully unlocks what AI makes possible requires the same rigor you’d bring to any hard engineering challenge.”
Barton brings more than four decades of product and engineering leadership to the COO role. He spent ten years at Amazon as one of the original architects of Alexa, leading teams responsible for the platform’s spoken language understanding and knowledge capabilities, before joining Rokt as Chief Product and Engineering Officer. Prior to Amazon, he held senior roles at NAVTEQ, Nokia, Revolabs, and Microsoft. He holds a BA in Physics from Harvard University.
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“Bill has spent his career solving hard problems at the intersection of technology and human systems, from building Alexa to leading R&D here at Rokt,” said Bruce Buchanan, CEO, Rokt. “The COO role sits at the intersection of our people, our risk posture, and our ability to operate at speed. His combination of technical depth and genuine passion for organizational development makes him exactly the right person for it. The way he thinks about AI’s impact on how teams work and what they’re capable of is precisely the lens we need on these functions right now.”
