Elizabeth Stone is one of the most senior technology leaders in the world.
As Netflix’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, she oversees the teams behind the company’s product, technology and data. It is a particularly important role at a time when AI is changing how products are built, how people work and how viewers find something to watch. Today, Netflix uses generative AI to make content discovery more personalised, interactive and immersive.
Stone’s perspective on this shift is notably practical. She does not think AI fluency means everyone needs to become an engineer. Instead, she wants people across Netflix to understand what AI is good at, where it falls short and when to use it. Good judgement matters as much as technical ability.
Before Netflix, Stone worked as an equity derivatives trader at Merrill Lynch and an economist at Analysis Group. She studied economics at MIT and went on to earn a PhD from Stanford. She then moved into technology, becoming Chief Operating Officer at healthcare company Nuna and Vice President of Science at Lyft.
At Netflix, Stone initially led Product Data Science and Engineering, then Data and Insights. She became CTO in 2023, the first person at Netflix to hold the title. In February 2026, she took on product as well, becoming Chief Product and Technology Officer.
What makes Elizabeth Stone particularly interesting is the way she thinks about technology as part of a bigger system. The question is rarely whether a technology works in isolation. It is what happens when you introduce it into a much larger system: the people using it, the product around it, the business, the culture and the decisions that follow.
Her latest thinking on AI reflects this. Stone talks about the growing importance of systems thinking, particularly as AI makes it easier to produce more work, more quickly. The harder question becomes knowing what is useful, what is noise and what deserves attention.
