Perion CEO Tal Jacobson on Building AI That Works Quietly and Performs Loudly

Artificial intelligence has become one of the loudest stories in business. Companies are racing to deploy copilots, launch AI products and announce new models, but for Tal Jacobson, CEO of Perion, the most valuable AI may ultimately be the technology that attracts the least attention.

“The best AI is the AI that disappears into the workflow,” Jacobson says. “If marketers have to constantly think about AI, you may be adding another layer of complexity instead of removing it.”

Rather than asking marketers and media buyers to adopt another standalone platform, the next generation of advertising technology will increasingly work within the systems and processes they already use. The goal is not to make AI more visible, but to help marketing teams make better decisions and produce stronger business outcomes.

From AI Visibility to Business Value

The first wave of AI in marketing was largely about visibility. Companies wanted to show they were adopting the technology through chatbots, copilots, generative creative tools and other AI-powered products.

As AI becomes embedded throughout the marketing process, the questions are becoming more practical. Is it improving media efficiency? Reducing wasted spend? Helping teams respond faster? Producing measurable incremental outcomes?

“Companies aren’t going to be measured by how many AI tools they have,” Jacobson says. “They’re going to be measured by how AI is improving business results.”

That philosophy is reflected in the Perion One Platform, which connects planning, creative, media activation, optimization and measurement through an independent operating system. It is designed to help marketers use campaign signals to inform decisions about spend, pacing, creative and performance.

“The question isn’t, ‘Where did we use AI?’” Jacobson says. “The question is, ‘Did we make a better decision, and did that decision produce a better outcome?’”

The Harder Problem Is Coordination

Advertising platforms can already optimize campaigns within their own environments. The harder challenge is coordinating decisions across them and replicating success across them.

Modern advertising is fragmented across CTV, digital out-of-home, display, social, retail media, and other channels. Each environment generates its own signals, applies its own optimization logic, and measures performance differently.

“Every platform can tell you how it’s performing inside its own walls,” Jacobson says. “The harder problem is understanding what all of those signals mean together, and then deciding what to do next.”

Perion’s approach is to connect those signals around an advertiser-defined business objective. Its AI Agent, Outmax, operates within Perion One as an execution layer, helping allocate media spend, manage pacing, and optimize toward outcomes across channels and platforms, including YouTube, Meta, TikTok, CTV, Digital out of Home, Open Web, Audio and more .

“When every signal can make the next decision smarter, optimization stops being a series of disconnected actions and becomes a continuous process,” Jacobson says.

The broader opportunity is to make AI the connective tissue across the marketing stack. It does not need to replace every platform. It can help teams interpret signals, coordinate decisions and respond more quickly across environments that have traditionally operated in silos.

Year One Unified the Infrastructure. Year Two Show Adoption.

Building an AI-first technology company is one challenge. Transforming an established public company around a new operating model is another.

For Jacobson, Perion’s first phase was about bringing its capabilities together under a unified infrastructure. The next is about proving the value of that transformation through adoption, customer results, and financial performance.

“The first year was about bringing the pieces together,” Jacobson says. “Now the job is to prove that this infrastructure creates measurable value at scale with the adoption of our AI technologies with our customers.”

The leadership challenge is balancing transformation with continuity. Marketers should not have to abandon established workflows because the technology behind the scenes is changing. They should experience better coordination, faster decisions and clearer connections between media activity and business outcomes.

“Transformation is not successful because you reorganized the company,” Jacobson says. “It’s successful when customers feel the difference and the business results show it.”

Perion’s strategy is to maintain clear customer-facing solutions while making the underlying infrastructure more unified and intelligent. Within Perion One, you’ll find the conversational interface, Ask Perion, which is designed to help marketers plan complex campaigns, interpret campaign performance, explore scenarios, and understand what is driving results and how to translate those insights into action.

Performance Should Be Loud

The next phase of AI in marketing may be defined less by the companies with the most visible AI products and more by those that make the technology useful within marketers’ existing workflows.

“AI doesn’t need to be the hero of the story,” Jacobson says. “The customer, the outcome and the performance should be the hero.”

That is the idea behind Perion’s transformation. The first year was about unifying the infrastructure. The second is about demonstrating what it can deliver for marketers and the businesses they serve.

The best AI works quietly, improves the decisions marketers already make and lets the results speak for themselves.