Mike Bidgoli Is one of TIME's 2026 Executives of the Year: Tech and Data - Time Magazine

The world’s largest free streaming catalog feels much more manageable with AI. In August, Tubi reached 110 million monthly active users, and chief product and technology officer Mike Bidgoli’s teams have built increasingly sophisticated recommendation systems to help them find the content they love—ones that move beyond “people who watched this also watched that” by understanding a user’s desired mood, genre, or plot, and incorporating insights from their previous viewing behavior.

Over the past year, Tubi has built its own foundation models around a vocabulary of viewer actions, used AI to select personalized preview scenes, and became the first streamer to launch a ChatGPT-native app so people can search for entertainment conversationally. The same scene-level understanding also powers Tubi Moments, matching advertising to the tone, sentiment, and visual cues of the specific content on screen. Bidgoli combines that technical investment with relentless experimentation: Tubi ran 1,021 product experiments in just six months. “The cost of building has fallen,” he says, allowing Tubi to attempt work it previously would never have staffed—and “just ship a lot more.”