Paramount is pushing further into artificial intelligence, with the David Ellison-led entertainment company hiring a new head of consumer AI on Monday.
Dane Glasgow, the former Meta executive who joined Paramount as chief product officer last year, announced the hiring of Barak Turovsky in a memo to staff, which was obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. Turovsky will be executive VP and head of consumer AI for the company
“He joins at a critical time in our company’s evolution as we look to scale AI and ML to meaningfully drive our growth,” Glasgow wrote in his memo. “He will be responsible for growing our AI / ML team and their capacity as we attract some of the best talent available. Barak and 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.”
Turovsky was most recently chief AI officer for General Motors, and before that worked in AI roles at Cisco, Trax, and Google, where he spent more than a decade.
Ellison has made investing in technology a centerpiece of his thesis for turning Paramount around, and for bringing in Warner Bros. Discovery, a $111 billion mega-deal that is still in process.
“Unless you can build a tech product that is truly competitive with what’s coming out of Silicon Valley, you can’t compete,” Ellison told reporters last year after the Paramount deal closed.. “And that has been one of the big problems that’s been facing legacy media, is they don’t actually understand that skill set and how critical that is, and that it is actually a combination of great content working with tech product hand in hand, that is how you actually get this business growing and scaling again, and you need both.”
“I don’t think AI is a replacement for creativity. It’s actually quite the opposite,” Ellison added. “The thing that has been really problematic from my perspective in media, is people thinking that technology is something to be feared. It’s not. The artists and the filmmakers that we work with are first, second, third, fourth, fifth on our priority list, we are a storytelling company first.”
Now the company has a dedicated AI exec who will be tasked with bringing that tech to life within he company. You can read Glasgow’s memo, below.
FROM: Office of Dane Glasgow
SL: Leadership Update – Welcome Barak!
Team,
As we see every day, the pace of technological change our industry is experiencing is rapid and we’ve already made tremendous progress in recent months to evolve our organization and products to remain on the forefront of what’s possible. In order to supercharge our transformation, I am excited to announce that Barak Turovsky is joining Paramount as our EVP and Head of Consumer AI, reporting directly to me.
Barak brings deep and highly relevant experience, having contributed to the development of foundational technologies that underpin AI and applying those capabilities at scale across multiple industries. At Google, he led the Languages AI product organization responsible for commercializing AI technologies across Google Search, Ads, YouTube, Cloud, Translate, Android, and other products, and spearheaded the product efforts behind the industry’s first large-scale commercial deployment of large language models and Transformers-based technology. Later, he held senior AI-focused roles at both General Motors and Cisco leading research, engineering and product teams to develop cutting-edge solutions and technologies.
He joins at a critical time in our company’s 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 their capacity as we attract some of the best talent available. Barak and 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 drive strong alignment across these efforts, Robert Dumoulin, SVP of Applied Intelligence, will report to Barak.
Technology will always be a creative multiplier and, with Barak’s leadership, I’m looking forward to seeing the impact he and the team will make as we drive our technological evolution forward. Please join me in welcoming Barak to Paramount!
Cheers!
Dane
