Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Paramount Global
Search every verified Philip Wiser interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Phil Wiser, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Paramount Global, has discussed the company's approach to generative AI and other emerging technologies in recent appearances. In a March 2024 SXSW session, Wiser described Paramount as a content company rather than a technology company, with technology teams serving creative output. He stated that Paramount moved its entire company to a cloud-based model and partnered with Adobe to create a proprietary "franchise model" AI system based on the company's intellectual property. Wiser said he does not aim to "win the gen AI arms race" but intends to stay close to those who do, and described generative AI as a "creative assistant" rather than a tool for generating finished content at scale from a single prompt. In an August 2025 interview, Wiser addressed AI copyright and licensing, stating that Paramount is "trying to be very thoughtful" about the issue and will "hold on to all of our rights as much as we can" while engaging with technology companies. He noted that litigation occurs when tech companies are "recalcitrant" and unwilling to have meaningful conversations. Wiser also discussed the rapid pace of AI development, comparing the trajectory to cloud and mobile technology, and said that humans' ability to absorb and adopt the technology may be the limiting factor. He emphasized that he keeps himself involved in financial decisions related to technology investments, saying that if a "big technical decision" falls to the CFO for approval, "it's never going to work right."
“I do pick those moments. And then when I joined Sony Music as a follow on to that, I saw that panic in the eyes of the executives when I was meeting with the CEO at the time. I could see that they had no idea what to do. And I was like, I can really help.”
“I insist that CTOs read a couple of good books or study online, learn about venture investing models and how to feed a team just enough money to get to the next step, but never overfeed that team.”
“When a big technical decision is going to fall to the CFO giving a green light, I'm doomed. It's never going to work right. So I have to be in the driver's seat when it comes to the finances and where we're making our investments.”
“The trajectory of change in this technology is breakneck speeds by any I think relative to anything. The capital investment going into AI, the acquisitions, the numbers, the valuations are just like we've never seen before and it's not letting up right now.”
“We're about to enter a phase where it's going to become very agile, and a lot of the actual near-final visualization is going to happen very early with AI-generated previsualization. So, you're going to be able to iterate on a story and see what it looks like, see how that story change shows up on the screen, and get a...”
“When we merged CBS and Viacom into what is now Paramount, we went all in with Amazon for cloud. It was clear that Amazon was going to be the market leader for any duration that we cared about at that point. So, we went all in with them and I got Andy Jasse to invest in us, which is, you know, when you're in Hollywood,...”
“The question for a big media company sitting on a pile of high quality data is how much should we build in our own models to augment what we can get out of general purpose models. When you're early on in the storytelling process, your models need to understand the universe because you never know what you're going to as...”
“I think the humans will be the limiting factor. Their ability to absorb and adopt and create with this technology is going to be what is limiting and maybe what even breaks it open. Timing is the hardest thing to predict in any of these trends.”
“We're trying to be very thoughtful about AI copyright and licensing. We will hold on to all of our rights as much as we can but we're engaging with these companies and I think we'll find the right benefit there. Whether an AI system or Photoshop outputs something that directly infringes our copyright, there's a problem...”
“We are not a technology company in Paramount. We are a content company and our technology teams are there simply to serve the creative output and to facilitate the storytelling that comes out of our businesses.”
“There's only one technology that trumps them all — it's the gen AI arms race. It's not just what OpenAI's doing or what Google's doing, it's a confluence of compute, storage, and networking improvements and unprecedented investment that's unlocking what's happening now.”
“I'm not gonna talk about NFTs... not that that's a bad thing, but it's past its prime. We actually launched Star Trek Enterprise NFTs because we experiment with all of these technologies constantly.”
“Gen AI is a creative assistant. I have yet to see anyone type in a text prompt and generate a net new piece of content at scale with one prompt that's gonna blow people away.”
“We've now moved our entire company to a cloud-based model. That was a big technology trend we jumped on a few years ago.”
“If we don't engage and don't work on this proactively, we're gonna have this back and forth. We're working with companies across the ecosystem to figure out how our content can support models while making sure we've got the right economics and addressing a very big regulatory issue.”
Richard Entrup interviewed Phil Wiser of Paramount about the transformative impact on the media and entertainment industry of ...
Portuguese and Spanish language translations for SXSW 2024 Keynotes and Featured Sessions presented by Itaú Wondering how tech trends like AI, cloud computing, mixed reality, and NFTs are reshaping production, processing, and distribution of content? Hear from the CTO of Paramount Global Phil Wiser on the new set of challenges and opportunities faced by the media industry during this evolution. He will demonstrate how Paramount is currently utilizing these technologies and reveal his considerations for when to invest in innovation. He will share his thoughts on how AI may change the way IP is…
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