Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with CTOs from very different digital media companies to understand how they think about the role, what they have in common and where they differ in approach. You can read earlier interviews with the CTOs of companies such as The New York Times, Mashable, Buzzfeed, Vice, Salon, Shutterstock, Digg, News Corp and Hearst here.

Next up is William Pence, CTO of AOL. Pence joined AOL from WebMD, where he was CTO, and previously served as CTO at Napster and at Universal Music Group after a decade at IBM. He’s a hard core engineer, with an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. I met with Pence in his office at Astor Place.

Media and technology are said to be changing at an ever increasing pace- how has that changed what you do?

If you look at the media industry there are several simultaneous transformations going on- almost closer to revolutions. First, digital advertising is getting automated through programmatic buying, and that is happening quickly. Second is the switch to mobile. It was coming, coming, coming and then it hit — now more than half our traffic is mobile. Third is video — video is taking over the web and driving time spent and a lot of dollars. The coda to that is that television and digital are converging.

So the challenge in my job is that we have to have a company that adapts to those changes. We are a major provider of programmatic advertising, of video, and we have a big effort in programmatic linear TV. We are hoping to help lead the way.

How do you organize for adaptability?

At a company level, we are approximately 1,000 engineers. To be adaptable and to drive the pace of change in terms of products and companies being launched, we have to deploy products quickly. Some of that is using well known processes — we’re highly agile and that’s always a work in progress to do well.

And we’re looking hard at infrastructure. We have a large investment in capital infrastructure and data centers, but we are now leveraging Amazon Web Services. That allows us to move quickly — the real advantage of the cloud is speed and agility. You have to be careful about cost management and security — the art of moving fast is to open yourself up to new capabilities while making sure you are in control. But you have to open your mind to new tools. The smart play is to give tools to developers and ask, what are you trying to accomplish? A good example — we just decommissioned a full dedicated Hadoop analytics cluster in our data center. Now we spin it up when needed in AWS and that took our cost down by a factor of ten.

You also get speed and agility through open source. Because AOL invented a lot of original technology, it’s easy for the company to be afraid of open source. But we are now pushing a lot out to the open source community. We’ve recently open sourced 5–6 projects; it’s become part of the DNA.

How do you think about R&D?

There are different ways to do R&D — we are not a company with a giant R&D department. We struggle with how you prototype and ship new ideas. You have to have some teams that are free to do just that. For instance, we have a new team that is called the Alpha team. They just launched Pip, a messaging app. Generally, it’s about having teams that are looking ahead. Some times they are looking at opportunities across businesses, like iBeacon.

You recently announced a partnership with Cornell Tech. How does working with universities fit with your strategy?

Working with universities is not about outsourcing R&D — it’s about engaging students. They bring a fresh perspective. For instance, the students at Cornell Tech; just as they get excited, they re-energize the people here. It’s about talent acquisition and about retention for us. It’s a matter of getting our relationships established with academic centers around the country.

What are your priorities in 2015?

We have a number of priorities in the coming year. On the product side, we’re trying to build world class brands that bring inventory. We have high ambitions on the ad stack — we just made another acquisition on that front in the last month. We intend to be a major player in the future of digital advertising and the future of TV. We are shipping a product called ONE by AOL this year, our unified ad stack. And then we are shipping new mobile experiences, establishing AOL as an innovator in product.

We are also working on a publisher stack. We are known as an innovator in the ad stack, but on the publisher side we have pretty complete systems and some pretty unique tools; for instance, we developed an analytics platform that is very differentiated. We’ve made major investments in aggregating content — all managed in one central repository. And last year we acquired Gravity, a company that does personalization.

What’s a bit further out on the development roadmap?

To say “Internet of Things” is obligatory, but in the context of advertising it’s very important. Look at the convergence of mobile and commerce — NFC and mobile commerce and embedded sensors and beacons — notifications and promotions and highly personalized commerce will be a big part of that. The time is not far off where with a mobile phone you will get deeply contextualized promotions.

Generally, we want people to understand what AOL is doing — we’ve made a massive transformation. We’re a top four web property online, a top player in video, a top player in advertising, and we are moving fast. It is an aggressive company, we are hiring a lot of new talent. If you haven’t followed the AOL story, you should.