Cristiano “Cris” Pierry is Group Vice President, Product, at Warner Bros. Discovery, where he leads product strategy for AI-powered content discovery across HBO Max and the company’s global streaming platforms. His teams build the systems that power personalization, search, video AI, AI-enhanced discovery, user and content understanding, and experimentation. By combining machine learning with editorial strategy, these systems connect customer intent with Warner Bros. Discovery’s global catalog and help millions of customers find and engage with the content most relevant to them.
Pierry is also helping shape Warner Bros. Discovery’s broader AI transformation by bringing frontier AI capabilities into both customer experiences and product development. His teams are advancing multimodal content understanding, AI-powered evaluation systems, intelligent developer workflows, and agentic product practices that improve quality, accelerate experimentation, and enable faster innovation. His work reflects a broader belief that AI is transforming not only the products customers use, but also how modern product organizations design, build, evaluate, and continuously improve those products.
Prior to Warner Bros. Discovery, Pierry served as Director of Personalization at Wayfair, where he led machine learning-powered personalization across web, mobile, email, and international shopping experiences, generating more than $250 million in incremental annual revenue while establishing personalization as a strategic business capability. Earlier, at Yahoo and Verizon Media, he led global product organizations responsible for search and personalization, scaling recommendation systems that delivered more than 13 billion recommendations and 1.2 billion customer interactions every day across 45 international markets.
Earlier in his career, Pierry held product leadership roles at Microsoft before serving as founder, Chief Product Officer, and executive leader across multiple venture-backed technology companies. His experience spans startups, enterprise software, and global consumer platforms, giving him a broad perspective on leading organizations through periods of technological transformation and rapid innovation.
Outside of his corporate work, Pierry founded Barcbots Robotics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing the next generation of engineers and technology leaders through competitive robotics. Teams from the organization have earned national recognition, culminating in a 2023 VEX Robotics World Championship.
Pierry holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, summa cum laude, from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and completed the Executive Engineering Leadership Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been recognized for product innovation and leadership, including Verizon Media’s Big Idea Award and selection as a Next Generation Executive at Wayfair. He frequently writes and speaks about AI-native product leadership, personalization, search, recommendation systems, and the future of consumer software, helping technology leaders understand how frontier AI is reshaping product strategy, engineering, and customer experiences.
