Why PJ Pereira is going all in on AI
The co-founder of Silverside AI talks to CR about setting up an advertising ‘lab’ rooted in AI and how the technology requires different skills from creatives. Plus why its rapid impact on the industry reminds him of the early days of the internet
11/08/2026 3:47 am
PJ Pereira is an outlier in the advertising industry: a creative who is regularly described as an industry legend who is actively, enthusiastically embracing AI, so much so that he’s co-founded a company, Silverside AI, which is devoted to “helping the world’s best brands revolutionise their marketing ecosystem”.
Silverside AI began life back in 2024 as an experimental AI lab within Pereira O’Dell, the independent agency also co-founded by Pereira, but it quickly felt like a bigger, more important venture than a side project.
“It was a group of people hired to experiment with AI, to understand if and how this new technology was going to influence the work that we did in advertising. And very quickly, we noticed that this was evolving way too fast,” explains Pereira, “and the kind of people you need to make this work are different from the kind of people you need in an advertising agency. If we keep the same group of people and the same structure, it will slow us down.”
