Deepna Devkar

Senior Vice President, Machine Learning & AI, Global Streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery

Speaker

Deepna leads the Content Discovery and Experimentation Engineering organization that powers most of the user journey and viewing experience once the user has logged in, all the way to what gets them to come back for more. From an engineering standpoint, this includes the content APIs that ingest, process and serve our content to the clients, the page structure and the tools that merchandising uses to design each of the interfaces like the Hero, content collections, rails, search and browse experience, personalized content on the homepage and lens pages, any experiments that we run to continue improving the user experience, and last but not the least, using data science and machine learning to analyze and predict content ROI for every piece of our content to help inform our content strategy, make decisions on greenlight new content, renewals, cancellations, and how much marketing spend to allocate for each. Deepna’s team is also investing in the use of GenAI for personalization, closed captioning, translation, dubbing, scene identification, and video editing.

Prior to this role, Deepna led Machine Learning, Data Platform and Experimentation at CNN. During her career in engineering, she has primarily worked in the media industry, both as a hands-on IC (individual contributor) and as a leader responsible for building and growing cross-functional teams of data, machine learning, and content engineering. She has over a decade of experience driving impact from projects ranging across audience segmentation, building first-party data and infrastructure, productionizing large-scale content recommendation systems and personalization, search engine and revenue optimization. She also held positions at Viacom and Dotdash (formerly About.com) where she attained expertise in the linear TV space and digital media and publishing landscape, respectively. Before her transition into engineering, she spent over a decade in scientific research, studying the psychological and neural underpinnings of human behavior.

Deepna has been recognized for her contribution as Folio's Top Women in Media, Corporate Champion. She is most passionate about evangelizing data, machine learning, and AI, and regularly speaks at meetings and conferences. She also regularly participates and hosts events supporting women in tech, management and leadership, and is a founding member of Chief. She holds the Chief Data Officer certification from Carnegie Mellon University. Currently, she also serves as Chair of the AI Tech Committee at WBD.

Deepna received her Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Texas, a postdoctoral fellowship from New York University, and also holds a Master's and Bachelor's degree in Psychology.