Netflix is revamping search with AI to improve discovery

Netflix is building a new search experience aimed at improving the discovery experience, and it’s going to use AI to do it, the company’s CEO Greg Peters said during its first-quarter results conference call.

Peters said Netflix is working on “interactive search that’s based on generative technologies” to help people find different titles.

Answering an analyst’s question, Peters said the company’s most popular titles that dominate popular conversation draw 1% of traffic, and because of this trend, improving discovery and recommendation is important to the company.

“There is more room to improve the discovery and recommendation experience, and therefore provide more value for members, and therefore find the biggest audiences for our titles,” he said.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Netflix has been testing OpenAI-powered search with select customers in Australia and New Zealand.

The company, which also started testing a new home page design on its TV app that brought a new way to display show titles and descriptions, plans to roll it out widely later this year.

“This [Homepage redesign] is something that we hadn’t made big structural changes to in over a decade. We believe that this will significantly improve Netflix’s discovery experience. We’ve been polishing and improving that experience based on the input we got from members who used it,” Peters noted.

The company said first-quarter revenue rose 12.5% to $10.54 billion from a year earlier.