U.S. HISPANIC
The Kitchen’s AI Trajectory: CFO Josh Pine Details Three Years of Integration and Future in Synthetic Dubbing
16 de mayo de 2025
Josh Pine
At the LA Screenings, PRODU spoke with The Kitchen’s newly appointed CFO, Josh Pine, who will leverage his 25+ years of extensive experience in the home entertainment industry to optimize operational efficiency, aiming to improve workflow by 30% through the strategic integration of advanced technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI), while maintaining The Kitchen’s renowned commitment to traditional quality.
Pine’s distinguished career includes a decade at Technicolor and 13 years across three different divisions of Sony. His professional journey began in operations and finance, supported by a master’s degree in the field, before dedicating the better part of 25 years to business development. “I’ve returned to my roots now in operations and finance,” said Pine. “I’m very happy to help bring efficiencies, utilizing the latest in technology, blending it with the old school quality that The Kitchen is known for, and bringing in AI tools as a toolbox and a toolset to complement what they’re doing. The goal is to stay not only relevant but a leader in the technology field.”
Pine emphasized a pragmatic and adaptive approach to AI implementation. “AI is great. It’s not perfect,” he noted. “It’s like any new technology; you have to adapt with the times. If you get too far behind, you never catch up. Part of my job here is to make sure that we are bringing in the best.”
His path to The Kitchen was paved by his previous role as COO and partner at Zealot, a Silicon Valley-based company that became a de facto standard in media entertainment for AI-generated subtitles, captions, and machine translation across over 70 languages. “They were one of my first clients about three and a half years ago, and we started integrating that technology into The Kitchen about three years ago. So that was the start of their journey into the AI world,” Pine explained. He sees the advent of AI synthetic dubbing as a natural progression for the company.
A critical driver for this technological focus is the significant gap between the explosive growth of translated media content (estimated at 30% to 40% annually) and the more modest growth rate of linguist professionals (around 2% annually). “We never look at AI, or even with the cost savings, as taking anybody’s job away. We’re a growing company,” Pine stated. “We need to be more efficient, and the only way to create more workflow is to utilize tools in the toolset. The only way to keep up with that demand is to utilize technology to create a more expanded workflow.”
The Kitchen will employ a nuanced strategy, applying AI differently based on content needs. “Hollywood titles that have a $100 million production budget—we’re not going to use computers to replace that today. There’s too much creativity in there,” Pine clarified. “But when you have thousands and thousands of titles, a catalog going into all these free streaming platforms, that’s where you need the boost in efficiency and technology to get that content out there. It’s a giant mouth to feed.”
He concluded with a clear vision: “We have a saying with AI: It won’t take your job away, but somebody using AI effectively will. We incorporate all sides of that for our clients.”
