Nift CRO Saket Mehta’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on AI-Powered Commerce Media

In an exclusive interview with MarTech Pulse, Saket Mehta, CRO of Nift, shares how AI-driven commerce media is transforming customer engagement, loyalty, and revenue growth across fintech platforms.

Can you walk us through your career progression from early roles to VP of Global Advertising Partnerships at Block, highlighting key milestones that shaped your expertise in fintech and ad revenue scaling?

I’ve seen monetization from every side of the ecosystem. I started on the buy side at TubeMogul, later part of Adobe, moved to the sell side at Chartboost, and then to the platform side at Gopuff and Block. That progression gave me a structural view of how incentives shape behavior across brands, platforms and consumers.

At Gopuff and Block, I led global commerce partnerships inside consumer-facing businesses where product experience drives retention. The mandate was not simply to drive revenue. It was to scale monetization while protecting the customer relationship.

Ensuring revenue scales in a way that supports the customer relationship has been central to my approach.

What attracted you to join Nift as its first Chief Revenue Officer, and how does your role in overseeing sales, partnerships, and business development align with your past experiences at Block and Gopuff?

Joining Nift as its first CRO felt like a natural convergence of everything I’ve built toward in my career. I’ve worked across adtech, logistics and fintech, and in each role I was in the seat of a commerce media revenue owner trying to grow monetization without compromising customer experience.

At Block and Gopuff, once sponsored products and search were optimized, the next lever often meant off-platform monetization. It drove revenue, but margins compressed and control over the experience diminished. That dynamic is shaping much of the industry today.

What drew me to Nift is that it approaches that challenge differently. It expands onsite surface area in a customer-first way and drives high-margin revenue without degrading trust. Commerce media is at a turning point, and my role is to build a revenue engine that compounds, scaling partnerships in a way that strengthens the customer relationship.

Read More – Understanding the Core Components of an AI-Driven Commerce Platform

In your recent Q&A with citybiz and posts about partnerships like Klarna and Zip, what key updates have you shared on Nift’s AI-driven commerce media advancements and customer loyalty strategies?

In recent conversations, I’ve focused on how commerce media is evolving from monetizing attention to monetizing appreciation. Consumer platforms across fintech, retail and travel operate on trust-based engagement surfaces such as payments, milestones, purchases and renewals. Those high-trust moments create opportunities for recognition.

Instead of inserting interruptive ads, we help platforms reward positive customer behavior through relevant brand offers delivered in context.

Nift’s AI matching technology aligns gifts to individuals and identifies the right moment for delivery. The result is incremental, high-margin revenue that reinforces the core experience.

Looking ahead to 2026, what trends do you predict in commerce media networks, especially for fintech platforms like those partnering with Nift, regarding AI personalization and native ad inventory growth?

AI is fundamentally changing where and how brands connect with consumers, and many monetization strategies haven’t caught up. Attention is harder to earn, the path to purchase is less linear, and consumers have little patience for irrelevant experiences. That creates both urgency and opportunity.

What I’m watching closely in 2026 is the redistribution of meaningful customer moments away from the transaction itself. Brands that are still optimizing primarily around checkout are working with a narrowing window. The ones gaining ground are those investing in touchpoints across the full journey, using AI not just to analyze behavior after the fact, but to act on it in context.

There’s also a structural shift underway in how brands think about discovery. As AI plays a larger role in how consumers research and evaluate products, formats that rely on interruption rather than relevance will continue to lose effectiveness. The commerce media models that will scale are those where the experience of receiving an offer feels additive, something a customer values rather than filters out.

Read More – How AI Is Revolutionizing the E-commerce Customer Experience

Based on your expertise in scaling ad partnerships across fintech and adtech, what one key piece of advice would you give marketing leaders aiming to build sustainable revenue streams without disrupting customer experiences?

My advice to marketers would be to start with the customer’s problem, not the revenue opportunity. I’ve seen this play out at every stage of my career — when monetization is treated as an afterthought, customers notice, and the cost to trust and retention far outweighs the short-term revenue gained. An engaged audience and rich first-party data are only as valuable as the experience you wrap around them.

The leaders building durable revenue streams are the ones working backward from the customer experience, asking what would actually add value at a given moment, and then figuring out how to generate revenue from that. It’s a harder problem to solve, but the results compound. When customers consistently respond positively to an ad experience, that’s a sustainable business model.

Reflecting on your transition to Nift and the evolving commerce media landscape, what’s the biggest lesson from your career that you’d share with aspiring executives in fintech and digital advertising?

The biggest lesson I’d share is to understand every side of the business. I spent years across the buy side, sell side and publisher side, and that perspective shaped how I approach partnerships and growth. When you understand what each party truly needs, not just what they request, you build stronger alignment.

Incentives define outcomes. If monetization is not aligned with customer value, the system eventually breaks. Durable growth requires disciplined alignment between revenue, product and customer experience.

Be customer focused. Create true win-win scenarios for platforms, brands and consumers. Use AI to create leverage, but remember that culture and execution matter just as much as strategy

If you could ask your younger self one question about navigating fintech’s rapid evolution toward AI-powered commerce, what would it be, and how would you answer it today based on your Nift journey?

If I could ask my younger self one question, it would be: are you building revenue in a way that strengthens the customer relationship?

Throughout my career inside consumer platforms, I’ve seen how easy it is to prioritize short-term performance over long-term trust. AI and new technology make optimization faster and more efficient, but the core question doesn’t change. Does this improve the experience, or does it erode it?

The companies that win over time are the ones that align monetization with customer value. Brands and advertisers should show up at their best. Platforms should feel more trusted after monetization, not less. When revenue systems reinforce the customer experience instead of competing with it, growth becomes durable.