PJ Pereira

Pereira began as a programmer and entered advertising at a time when, he says, programming was not accepted as creative work. He spent decades proving otherwise, co-founding Pereira O'Dell and building a reputation for branded entertainment, including a four-year run of Intel films built on a single simple idea, that it is what is inside that counts. Across the work he has refused the industry's divisions between copywriter, art director and technologist, insisting he is all three at once.

The path to Silverside AI started with a novel. On a flight to Cannes ten years ago, Pereira wrote a script about kung fu versus artificial intelligence, turned it into a book he worked on for eight years, and interviewed ethicists, engineers and brain scientists along the way. When generative AI emerged around GPT-2 he began experimenting to launch the book, saw where it was heading, and built a lab with his partner, naming it Silverside after a small Bay Area fish. The company produced a global Coca-Cola campaign with AI, which drew furious responses at the time, repeated the feat with better technology the following year, and now spans strategy, creative, production, technology and client transformation.