Paramount is furthering its efforts in artificial intelligence, with David Ellison’s entertainment company hiring a new head of consumer AI on Monday.
Dane Glasgow, a former Meta executive who joined Paramount last year as chief product officer, announced the hiring of Barak Turovsky in a memo to staff. hollywood reporter. Turovsky will become the company’s executive vice president and head of consumer AI.
“He joins us at an important time in our evolution as we look to scale AI and ML to meaningfully drive our growth,” Glasgow wrote in the memo. “He will be responsible for expanding our AI/ML team and its capabilities as we attract top talent. Barak and the team will also explore ways to leverage AI to improve personalization, content discovery, platform intelligence, consumer engagement, and monetization capabilities across Paramount+ and Pluto TV.”
Mr. Turovsky most recently served as chief AI officer at General Motors, and before that spent more than a decade in AI roles at Cisco, Trax, and Google.
Ellison has centered his thesis on investing in technology to turn Paramount around and bring in Warner Bros. Discovery, a mega $111 billion deal still in the works.
“If we can’t build technology products that are truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, we’re not going to be able to compete,” Ellison told reporters last year after closing the deal with Paramount. “And that’s one of the big problems that legacy media faces is that they don’t really understand that skill set and how important it is, and they don’t really understand that it’s actually a combination of great content and technology products that work together. That’s how you actually grow this business and scale it again, and you do.”You need both. ”
“I don’t think AI will replace creativity; in fact, quite the opposite,” Ellison added. “The real problem from my perspective in the media industry is that people think technology is something to be feared. It’s not. The artists and filmmakers we work with are number one, number two, number three, number four, number five on our priority list. We are first and foremost a storytelling company.”
The company now has a dedicated AI executive tasked with bringing the technology to life in-house. Mr. Glasgow’s memo can be read below.
from: Dane Glasgow Office
SL: Leadership Update – Barak, welcome!
team,
As we see every day, the pace of technological change our industry is experiencing is rapid, and we have already made great strides in recent months to evolve our organization and products to remain at the forefront of what’s possible. To accelerate our transformation, I am pleased to announce that Barak Turovsky will join Paramount as our Vice President and Head of Consumer AI, reporting to me.
Barak brings deep and relevant experience by contributing to the development of the foundational technologies that underpin AI and applying those capabilities at scale across multiple industries. At Google, he led the Language AI product organization responsible for commercializing AI technology across products such as Google Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Translation, and Android, and spearheaded the product efforts supporting the industry’s first large-scale commercial deployment of large-scale language models and Transformers-based technology. He then held senior positions focused on AI at both General Motors and Cisco, where he led research, engineering, and product teams to develop cutting-edge solutions and technologies.
He joins us at a critical time in our evolution as we look to scale AI and ML to meaningfully drive our growth. He will be responsible for growing our AI/ML team and its capabilities as we attract top talent. Barak and his team will also explore ways to leverage AI to improve personalization, content discovery, platform intelligence, consumer engagement, and monetization capabilities across Paramount+ and Pluto TV. To foster strong collaboration across these efforts, Robert Dumoulin, senior vice president of applied intelligence, will report to Barak.
Technology is always a multiplier for creativity, and with Barack’s leadership, we look forward to seeing the impact he and his team will have as we drive the evolution of technology. Please join me in welcoming Barack to Paramount!
cheers!
Dane
