About Elizabeth Stone
Elizabeth Stone, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Netflix, discussed the company's approach to integrating artificial intelligence during an appearance at Bloomberg Tech 2026 in San Francisco on June 3, 2026. Stone described the scope of her combined product and technology role, which she said covers disciplines including engineering, data science, design, product management, and consumer research, spanning areas such as content decision-making, studio production, promotion, the user experience, content delivery, live games, and advertising. She stated that bringing product and tech together was intended to maintain functional excellence while orienting teams toward specific problems, such as member experience, games, and content.
Stone said that generative AI is being used to create richer descriptions of content and to test conversational discovery, allowing the platform to match a user's preferences with detailed content information and cultural context. She cited the example of "Berlin season two" in Spain, where AI tools were used to recreate digital doubles of sets, reframe and relight scenes, and bring creative visions to life. Stone stated that AI and machine learning have long been used at Netflix for subtitles, dubbing, UI localization, and title treatment localization, and she described the next era of AI as an opportunity to supercharge those areas. She added that the most impactful application of AI may be in improving the member experience through greater personalization, interactivity, and immersion, which she said could help address consumer frustration with navigating large content libraries. Stone emphasized that the company's approach is "not technology for technology's sake" but rather technology applied to making content and delivering it to members.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Elizabeth Stone's recent appearances.
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Transcript (4 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
Can we talk about specifically live? Because live was a big launch last year. What was your process of getting this to launch? Was it overly planned out? Was it just yolo? Something in between?
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Elizabeth Stone0:09
Yeah, yolo. Not quite yolo. Originally, it was scheduled for July 2024. It was rescheduled because of Tyson's health to November 2024, which gave us a few more months. It was an incredibly tight timeline end to end. Not to mention that we had a lot of learnings from Paul Tyson because it was such a large event. I've often mentioned it was the world's largest, right? 65 million concurrent streams. Watching that tick up, I think one of our biggest ever days of signups. So, we were watching the signups go through the roof that day. Then watching, I think by the time we were in some of the first couple of undercard fights, we'd already exceeded our expectations for how big the fight would be.
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Interviewer0:47
Can you explain to me what was the control room like?
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Elizabeth Stone0:49
The data science and engineering team collectively put together a set of dashboards that would give us visibility into some core quality of experience metrics. So things like time to render, app start timing, re-buffer rates. It was the rebuffers that we started to see amp up during Paul Tyson. So yes, imagine there were probably a hundred people on site. I was sitting in a room with maybe 30 or 40 both engineers and data scientists. We had our laptops and makeshift screens sitting there. Everyone was hardlined into internet so that we weren't risking anything with the Wi-Fi. Yeah. We had VPN backups if anything was to go wrong. We had a launch commander with a headset dialed in talking to people in the production truck, but it was new. So, it wasn't streamlined. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't like the fancy launch rooms I imagine a lot of live productions typically have. And so we're watching metrics, something start flashing in red, causing you to draw attention to it. We would create makeshift Google Meet rooms so small groups of people could triage. We had people who were on the hook for being the informed captains or decision makers. When I think about where we were for Paul Tyson, I joke with people, I feel like I lost 10 years of my life in that one night.
