Executives at Paramount Skydance have fallen in love with AI — especially its knack for quickly knocking out tasks that would otherwise take workers hours to complete.
Paramount streaming leaders trumpeted “productivity acceleration” thanks to AI during a quarterly tech meeting on Wednesday, according to a screenshot of the presentation viewed by Business Insider.
During the meeting, higher-ups highlighted how an AI-powered triage tool for data processing finished a two- to four-hour task in less than 10 minutes, the screenshot showed.
The presentation also said that tech staffers have used the AI coding tool Claude Code to complete a task that used to take days in minutes.
Paramount’s embrace of AI is part of CEO David Ellison’s plan to make the 114-year-old media company into a “tech-forward” enterprise, ahead of its plan to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.
Four high-level Paramount employees told Business Insider that their company is increasingly leaning into AI, and early results have been encouraging.
“Coding is not the bottleneck. It no longer takes days to write the code — it takes hours,” a veteran streaming leader said.
Paramount has encouraged tech employees to freely use AI, two employees said.
However, the company told tech employees on Wednesday that it’s starting to implement “per-user monthly spend limits” on AI tokens, though the quotas will be far above most employees’ usage.
“This will be a high limit based on usage analytics,” said Alan Ho, Paramount’s senior director of identity architecture and AI enablement, in a Slack message that was viewed by Business Insider.
If Paramount employees don’t use AI, ‘something’s missing in your drive’
Besides pushing into AI, Paramount is putting its streamers on a unified tech platform this summer, has expanded the role of data and insights, and made key hires — like former Google executives Barak Turovsky as consumer AI head and Hugh Williams as an EVP.
In recent months, Paramount has created an AI dashboard that shows Cursor token usage, similar to ones at Disney and the finance giant JPMorgan.
A top AI user on Paramount’s dashboard said that the company’s shift toward AI “almost felt like it happened overnight” and said staffers “feel more empowered every day” to use those tools.
“It’s just part of how we work,” this person said of AI. “It’s taken a lot of the heavy lifting out of the technical side, which has freed up more time and headspace for the creative work.”
A Paramount tech executive said they weren’t diving deep into AI until the spring, but they’re now aboard the hype train. AI tools can handle weeks’ worth of work in minutes, they said.
“At some point, if you’re not using it, something’s wrong,” this executive said. “Something’s missing in your drive.”
Another AI-focused employee said they’d been using teams of AI agents, deploying as many as 10 automated bots at once to accomplish tasks.
The veteran streaming leader said they’d found that AI usage correlated with productivity, and that the amount of code produced was soaring.
“I was giving praise to developers who appeared in the top 10,” the veteran streaming leader said.
Paramount has been hustling to converge its streaming tech platforms by the middle of the year, which has been a top company priority. Without the rapid maturity and adoption of AI, the veteran leader said they didn’t think their team would have accomplished its goals on time.
