Rokt CRO Craig Galvin’s Exclusive Interview with MarTech Pulse on AI and the Transaction Moment

Craig, thank you for joining us. To start, can you walk us through your journey from co-founding a top digital agency in Australia to becoming CRO at Rokt, highlighting key milestones that shaped your expertise in e-commerce?

I’ve spent more than 25 years building digital businesses at the intersection of technology, media, content and commerce.

My journey in digital media started as one of the inaugural team members of Yahoo! Australia. I then co-founded The White Agency in Australia, which grew into one of the country’s largest independent digital agencies before being acquired by STW, now WPP. Those experiences grounded me in customer-first mindset, performance, accountability, and the discipline of tying digital strategy to measurable business outcomes and not vanity metrics.

I later led content strategy across Southeast Asia for iflix, where we shifted to a data-led model focused on audience signal quality over volume. The core lesson was that understanding behavior at a granular level in a specific moment outperforms broad audience assumptions applied at scale. That insight has stayed with me.

Before joining Rokt, I served as Chief of Staff at Global Citizen, where I helped expand the organization’s presence in Canada and India through strategic partnerships. It was a different context but the same discipline: aligning resources to outcomes, building coalitions, and moving fast in complex environments.

In 2022, I joined Rokt as SVP of Business Development to scale global partnerships. In 2023, I stepped into the CRO role, leading global revenue strategy across ecommerce partners and advertisers. The common thread throughout my career has been building durable growth through long-term partnerships and aligning value to measurable commercial and customer outcomes.

With over 25 years in digital business development, how has Rokt’s AI-driven approach at the transaction moment transformed revenue strategies for global ecommerce partners?

Historically, digital growth has been achieved through a number of different tactics: amongst them; converting existing physical customers into digital channels, expanding the customer base, increasing the number of owned channels, and potentially increasing spend to acquire more customers. That model is under structural pressure. Costs are rising, signal quality is declining, and the browsing and discovery journey is being fundamentally reshaped by AI.

Consider what’s happening right now. Bain & Company reports that 30 to 45 percent of U.S. consumers already use AI for product research. AI-driven referral traffic accounts for up to 25 percent of visits at some retailers. Commerce media and the advertising business are largely dependent on humans browsing and clicking. When AI agents research, compare, and select products on behalf of a consumer, they bypass sponsored listings entirely. The agent doesn’t see the ad, doesn’t scroll, doesn’t click.

Rokt operates at the Transaction Moment — when a customer has confirmed intent by completing a purchase. It’s one of the few digital surfaces likely to remain durable: a place where a real, identified human is present, regardless of how they arrived.

For ecommerce partners, this transforms checkout from a functional step into a high-performing customer and revenue environment. Using real-time transaction signals — cart composition, purchase context, customer history — we help them generate incremental revenue while improving the customer experience. For advertisers, it provides access to confirmed purchase intent in an environment where buying behavior is already established. That dramatically improves acquisition efficiency. And because this model relies on first-party transaction data, it’s more resilient in a privacy-first world where third-party tracking is diminishing.

Read More – Inside the Architecture of AI Commerce Platforms

Rokt’s 2026 outlook highlights trends like smarter signals and checkout as the key commerce moment. What is your take on how these address current MarTech challenges in digital transactions?

Marketers are facing many structural challenges simultaneously: rising media costs, declining signal clarity, and AI disruption across the user flow. Old strategies and tactics can no longer be relied upon to achieve the same outcomes.

Smarter signals are replacing broad targeting. Instead of optimizing for impressions or clicks, leading organizations are measuring incremental value: did this interaction drive revenue that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise? The brands and retailers that will outperform in 2026 will be disciplined about where they engage and will hold those engagements accountable to measurable revenue outcomes.

Our research shows you led iflix’s shift to data-led short-form content in SEA, boosting acquisition. How does that experience inform Rokt’s strategies for personalized loyalty in checkout today?

At iflix, we learned that understanding viewing behavior at a granular level drives better outcomes than broad audience assumptions. This was true across regions, countries, and even down to the city level.

That lesson applies directly to checkout. For ecommerce partners, checkout is a moment of peak engagement. The customer is active, committed, and focused. That makes it an opportunity to extend value — whether through relevant offers, loyalty benefits, or complementary experiences — directly within the transaction flow.

When handled with discipline and relevance, checkout becomes not just a revenue driver, but a relationship-strengthening moment, extending the customer experience and driving user value simultaneously with commercial value.

Read More – AI-Powered Customer Experience Across the E-Commerce Journey

Looking ahead to 2026, what specific predictions do you have for how commerce media convergence and white space will impact Rokt’s global expansion and client outcomes?

Digital environments are more crowded than ever. At the same time, brands are under pressure to achieve more in those same spaces, even as customer attention narrows and expectations rise.

For ecommerce partners, protecting checkout white space is critical. Not every surface should be monetized. Disciplined placement that prioritizes relevance will outperform cluttered experiences. Fewer but higher-quality engagements in confirmed-intent environments will drive stronger returns than broad impression strategies. Protecting the customer experience and balancing short-term and long-term value will only become more important.

For MarTech marketers aiming to boost e-commerce revenue, what top suggestions do you offer on leveraging first-party signals and restraint over impression volume?

For ecommerce marketers, start with the signals you already own. Transaction data, cart composition, browsing patterns, and purchase history are high-quality indicators of intent.

Focus on moments where intent is strongest — especially around the point of purchase — and measure success in terms of incremental revenue, not just engagement metrics.

Impressions and clicks are easy to track, but they don’t always indicate incremental impact. Ask a harder question: Did this interaction generate revenue that would not have happened otherwise?

And finally, embrace restraint. More exposure does not automatically mean more growth. If a customer has not responded, will an additional exposure increase that likelihood? Reducing frequency and using signals that focus on high intent and likelihood to convert improves performance and the customer experience, enabling you to do more with less.

Read More – Turning Market Signals into Revenue Opportunities with AI

As CRO, what one bold move should revenue leaders make in 2026 to stay ahead in the evolving digital commerce landscape?

Recognize that your most valuable digital real estate might not be where you think it is.

Most companies over-invest in the top of funnel and under-invest in the moment of highest customer intent. The confirmation page, the order summary, the post-purchase screen — these are treated as functional afterthoughts. In reality, they’re among the most strategically important surfaces a business owns.

This becomes urgent as AI reshapes discovery. If AI agents compress the browsing journey, the number of moments where a business has a direct, unmediated digital interaction with its customer shrinks dramatically. The transaction moment is one of the last remaining touchpoints where a real human is present, identified, and receptive. It’s the natural surface for loyalty enrollment, cross-sell, brand reinforcement, and first-party data capture — outcomes that historically happened across the entire browsing experience but increasingly concentrate at the point of transaction.

The bold move in 2026 won’t be expanding into more channels. It will be treating the Transaction Moment as the strategic asset it is. The companies that get this right will build durable customer relationships that survive the AI revolution. The ones that don’t will find themselves paying to re-acquire the same customers through increasingly expensive and intermediated channels.