Paramount's New Head Compares AI to 1990s CGI, and His Father Is Oracle's Founder

David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, was asked about AI during the latest earnings call, and he shared a clear judgment: it is “hard to imagine” that AI’s impact on film production will not exceed that of CGI.

His full remarks go roughly like this: Zoom out to look at the full production pipeline, and AI has the potential to be the biggest creative unlock in modern history. The last technology that came close to that scale was CGI and digital compositing in the early 1990s, a wave that spawned Jurassic Park and Terminator 2.

This take is not exactly new. For the past two years, Hollywood executives talking about AI have mostly stuck to the same script: cautious optimism, emphasis on the tool’s utility, and a side effort to reassure labor unions. But the comment hits different coming from Ellison.

He is the son of Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the richest people on the planet. David Ellison built Skydance from the ground up, merged it with Paramount last year, and now runs the legendary old studio. Put another way, he is the guy who brought database industry DNA into Hollywood. Traditional filmmakers usually limit their imagination of AI to questions like “will it steal screenwriters’ jobs” or “can it generate storyboards”, but Ellison uses CGI as his reference point — a tech that was once widely bashed for “ruining cinema” before it became basic industry infrastructure.

What makes this analogy interesting is its time scale. It took roughly 15 years for CGI to go from being widely questioned to becoming a standard industry feature. At the current pace of deployment across all major studios, AI’s penetration through production workflows will likely not take nearly that long. Paramount Skydance itself is already testing AI tools in segments including post-production and animation previsualization. Ellison did not lay out specific use cases, but the term “production pipeline” covers a huge scope, from script breakdown all the way to virtual production.

Of course, you cannot take everything said on an earnings call at face value. When a CEO makes a statement about new technology, half the pitch is for investors, and the other half for Wall Street analysts. Ellison needs to convince the market that Paramount Skydance has viable levers for cost control, and AI is one of those levers. The company is under pressure to cut costs after the merger, and the story of AI tools cutting expenses in post-production and VFX is far more tangible than vague talk of “creative unlocks”.

Still, the very fact that he grouped AI in the same category as CGI proves at least one thing: for the people who actually control the purse strings, AI is no longer an experimental toy. The 1990s wave of digital technology pushed old-school optical effects studios into the history books, while birthing a host of new players outside of Industrial Light & Magic. Which players get pushed out, and which new ones emerge, should become clear in the next two to three years.

As for the claim of “the biggest creative unlock in modern history”, we can hold off on full endorsement for now. CGI unlocked unprecedented visual spectacle, while AI is set to unlock efficiency across the full production workflow. The two achievements are not directly comparable in scale, but Ellison’s willingness to make that claim on a public earnings call shows Paramount Skydance’s internal AI roadmap is far more concrete than he has let on publicly.