hen Airi Sutherland was growing up in New Zealand, she dreamed of working for the International Criminal Court to fight crimes against humanity. In another world, she might have been the next Amal Clooney. Instead, she has built an impressive career in e-commerce, where she is considered a thought leader in personalisation and fraud prevention and is inspiring the next generation of talented women.  It all started with a sales job at Hallenstein Brothers, a New Zealand menswear chain, where she worked while studying at university. Never one to do things by half-measures, she won an award for salesperson of the year, flew to Auckland and was offered an e-commerce co-ordinator role at the company’s sister brand, Glassons. “I always had a bit of an interest in technology and had done a minor in IT at uni. I was planning to do that for six months, but then I just completely fell in love with e-commerce technology,” Airi told Inside Retail. “I loved the balance of the analytics and the intuition. I’ve always been quite creative so I really enjoyed the design side of it, which I got to be quite heavily involved with.” At the time, Glassons, like many fashion retailers, had a very lean team. It was just starting to expand into the Australian market, and Airi was involved in building the new website. “It was back in the day when, as an e-commerce co-ordinator, you got to wear all of the hats,” she said. “I feel sad that these days you don’t get to work cross-functionally, and you have to choose what you want your specialty to be quite early on.” After spending a few years in various e-commerce roles at Glassons, Airi joined True, New Zealand’s biggest privately owned advertising agency, to broaden her skillset.  “Funnily enough, it was actually my mum who said, ‘You should go out and get some agency-side experience so you get that technology exposure you’re not going to get in fashion retail businesses.’ A lot of e-commerce sites back then were quite set-and-forget,” Airi explained. “It’s probably the only piece of advice from my mum I’ve taken seriously.” At the age of 25, she became True’s head of digital, advising big international clients, including Uber and ASB, Commonwealth Bank’s New Zealand arm. Looking back, she said, “I definitely did not have the experience I needed for it. I was the youngest person by far on the senior leadership team, and it was one of those sink-or-swim moments.” For the next few years, she didn’t take a holiday and often worked 12-plus hours a day, but she upskilled herself quickly and got to the point where she could contribute at the level she wanted.  “One week, I was building a chatbot for Uber and I remember, the chatbot was launching at midnight, and we were still training it around 11:30pm. Those were the sorts of projects you didn’t necessarily get the opportunity to do back then if you were in the fashion retail space,” she said.  Similarly, when Airi moved to Australia to become McDonald’s digital commerce and optimisation lead in 2018, she was able to experiment with technology she would not have had access to in most other organisations.  “Once a project was signed off, the budget wasn’t an issue, the resource wasn’t an issue. If you could demonstrate from an ROI perspective that this was an initiative you wanted to pursue, you could do it,” she said.  It was here that Airi built McDonald’s first-ever propensity model, using AI to personalise a communication and promotion strategy for each individual customer based on their online and offline transaction history. Within its first year, the model delivered over $100 million of incremental revenue, and earned Airi the company’s annual Moving the Needle award.  “That was a really proud career moment for me,” she said.  While Airi could have continued climbing the corporate ladder at McDonald’s, she wasn’t ready to give up a more hands-on technical role. Plus, she missed working in fashion retail, an industry she has always loved.  In 2021, she became head of digital and e-commerce for The Upside and went on to hold similar roles at Billini and Ksubi before joining women’s fashion brand Outcast in June last year. As vice-president of e-commerce and technology, she is now focused on solving complex fraud problems associated with selling online in the US and harnessing the full potential of data-driven personalisation and segmentation.  “I think as an industry we’re really challenging ourselves to provide that better customer experience and use technology in a really meaningful way, to drive not just commercial outcomes but also to drive a really incredible customer experience,” she said.