Senior Vice President of AI and Product at Rakuten
Rakuten Group
Natalie Mao is Senior Vice President of AI and Product at Rakuten, a global technology leader in services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society, where she oversees the development of a diverse portfolio of AI-powered products and services that span the Rakuten Ecosystem. Her work covers search, recommendations, personalization, customer service, AI safety and agentic experiences.
She also leads Rakuten International's AI-nization, an organization-wide effort to embed AI into every part of work, improving customer experience, operational and marketing efficiency, and measurable business impact at scale.
Before Rakuten, Natalie spent nearly two decades at Amazon and Microsoft building and scaling AI-powered products used by hundreds of millions of customers worldwide, and she holds multiple U.S. patents. She is passionate about turning AI advances into measurable customer and business value, while fostering inclusive, high-performing teams.
Sunday Jan 10
1:45pm - 2:15pm
Insider One Stage, Javits North
Join Kroger, Mercado Libre, and Rakuten Ichiba to discover how they have architected an enterprise agentic AI platform for maximum flexibility, rock-solid security, and optimal cost efficiency across any cloud. This session will review the latest advancements in Agentic AI and share proven strategies for deploying open-source models at scale, giving you greater control over and IP ownership of your models, at significantly lower inference cost. You don’t have to choose between frontier performance and open-source control. Leading retailers are building hybrid agentic platforms that leverage both.
