#75: PJ Pereira and Rob Wrubel on launching SILVERSIDE, an AI innovation lab

That's how it started to grow from there.

I'd probably just add my perspective.

Having been one of those early clients of Pereira Odell, I mean, I've been in the Valley since the early days of multimedia software and the internet 1.0.

I was the founding CEO of Ask Jeeves.

So I can lay some claim to being probably the first actual natural language attempt at a sort of sentient kind of system on the internet through Ask Jeeves.

but have been in the space of marketing automation and technology, whether it was paid search and then on to social media and then on to... cloud-based and automated CRM systems and big data in the cloud and Hadoop clusters, every one of these transformations, it took marketing operations and organizations anywhere from two to three years even to grok the impact.

They all said no.

When we started working together, when I was a client at Pereira Odell, it was in 2009.

And at that point, you had cloud, mobile, and you had the social web all as ideas that started out of san francisco and took about three years to essentially transform the entire way marketers think and we looked at ai and we said this has deeper transformative potential and it will take marketing organizations, and creative teams a long time to understand how to use these tools to develop and empower their craft and impact.

And so that's when we set up Silverside and said, look, let's be in service of that transformation, but from a point of view of let's empower creative teams and the best creative thinking so it can have higher impact, greater scale, and without losing craft and the human creativity that makes great work great.