Paramount has hired former Google, Cisco and General Motors executive Barak Turovsky to serve as its executive vice president of consumer AI.
In his new role, Turovsky will be responsible for growing the media giant’s AI and machine learning teams and exploring ways to leverage AI to improve personalization, content discovery, platform intelligence, consumer engagement and monetization capabilities across Paramount+ and Pluto TV.
“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,” Paramount chief product officer Dane Glasgow said in a memo to staff on Monday. “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.”
Paramount senior vice president of applied intelligence Robert Dumoulin will report directly to Turovsky.
Turovsky most recently served as chief AI officer at GM, where he led the automaker’s enterprise artificial intelligence strategy and deployment across its product, engineer, manufacturing and corporate functions.
Before that, he was vice president of AI at Cisco, leading product, research and engineering initiatives related to the technology. He was also chief product and technology officer at the computer vision AI solutions firm Trax.
Additionally, Turovsky spent more than a decade at Google, leading the Languages AI production organization, which was responsible for commercializing the technology across Google Search, Assistant, Ads, YouTube, Cloud AI, Translate, Android and other products.
Under his leadership, the tech giant scaled AI-powered experiences serving billions of users worldwide across multilingual understanding, semantic advertising, recommendation and ranking systems and enterprise AI services.
Turovsky joins Paramount as CEO David Ellison is looking to use AI and machine learning to transform the company into a technological leader in entertainment.
This also comes as Paramount+, Pluto TV and BET+ will launched on a unified backend infrastructure this summer. As part of the move, BET+ will be absorbed into Paramount+.
In an interview with TheWrap, Paramount chief revenue officer Jay Askinasi also teased a “complete evolution” of Pluto TV, with the FAST service’s refresh also set to take place this summer. That will include enhanced content discovery through automated carousels, Content Spotlight units, curated collections and Top 10 experiences.
Paramount+ is further expanding into new content formats and interactive features, such as the launch of clips on its mobile app, which have seen “high engagement” in initial beta testing. Executives also plan to add gaming, live stats and polling and are exploring adding AI-driven artwork.
“These investments all support our longterm DTC growth and are foundational to where we’re taking the business,” Ellison told analysts during the company’s first quarter earnings call last month. “These are all great learnings that will prepare us for the [Warner Bros. Discovery] transaction at the end of the third quarter.”
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