The streaming service that taught a generation to scroll endlessly now wants to sell them the cure. At the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Netflix’s chief product and technology officer, Elizabeth Stone, said the company is deploying generative AI to help subscribers cut through the volume of content it has spent two decades piling up.
The framing was telling. Stone described “a consumer frustration that’s brewing, which is, there’s so much content. How do I make sense of it, and what’s right for me, and what’s right for me in this moment?” The frustration is real, and Netflix is closer to its source than most.
Stone said generative AI and natural language processing are already being used to help viewers pick shows based on mood, and that the company is testing a voice interface among other experiments aimed at sharpening recommendations. The pitch is for an experience that is “more personalized, more interactive, more immersive,” in her words.
None of this is a small adjustment to a side feature. Recommendation is the product. Netflix has long held that the large majority of what subscribers watch comes from what the service surfaces rather than what they search for, which makes the discovery layer the part of the business most exposed to a better idea.
