Spotify’s AI Chief Wants to Remix Our Relationship With Discovery
Navigating an onslaught of new AI-enabled features, Ziad Sultan tries to make streaming smarter and more social.
When Ziad Sultan began thinking about artificial intelligence, there was no craze afoot. Not even a cultish flurry of excitement. Sultan, who is now Spotify’s vice president of personalization, responsible for a slate of new AI features for the audio streamer, first caught the bug in the early 2000s. He was 17, had just moved to Cambridge, Mass., from Beirut, was not yet fluent in English, and began studying this then-unfashionable topic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“That time was really an in-between,” Sultan remembered. “It was not a period of very active excitement around AI. But the promise of it was always fascinating to me.”
Nearly two decades later, Sultan’s early intuition that AI was going to be the field that defined tech has finally paid off. Since becoming the AI czar at Spotify in 2019, Sultan has led many of the company’s efforts to expose consumers to the riches of machine learning, beginning with personalized playlists and extending now to AI DJs and translated podcasts.