Welcome to the world of intelligent celebrity avatars.
Genies
Genies, the Los Angeles-based AI companion company, today introduced a suite of tools that let celebrities and talent agencies create and control interactive digital versions of themselves. The AI Companion Talent Creation Tools enable entertainment, music, and sports organizations to train expressive, engine-ready avatars that can hold one-on-one conversations with fans while preserving ownership of likeness and personality rights.
The launch builds on Genies’ earlier announcement with Unity, expanding its tools into a broader ecosystem for developers, agencies, and IP owners. Built to power expressive, engine-ready avatars, Genies’ technology now connects those same capabilities for developers to a framework for IP-driven AI companions and companion-based games through its Unity partnership. Together, these tools enable major IP holders to bring their assets to life through intelligent characters and new forms of fan engagement. As Nigam described, Genies is building “the visual layer for large language models,” turning AI into something people can see, play with, and build a relationship with. That vision now extends to Hollywood, where organizations can securely manage digital identity at scale, generating thousands of engine-ready avatars through Genies’ autogeneration technology.
Genies’ Avatar creation and management tools.
Genies
Recent months have brought a flood of unauthorized celebrity likenesses across social media and brand campaigns, forcing artists and studios to issue takedown notices and lawsuits. Genies positions its system as a rights-safe framework that gives creators the same generative power now available to imitators. “As platforms like OpenAI’s Sora face questions about likeness use without consent,” said Jake Becker, Director of Business Development and Strategy at Genies, “the need for control and protection has never been stronger.”
The new tools enable talent agencies to replicate entire rosters of performers and athletes. Each individual can then manage their own AI companion through a private portal. Avatars can chat, emote, and appear inside apps and games. Using the Genies creation stack, talent can autogenerate an avatar from a single photo, train its personality through recorded content, and deploy it across interactive experiences.
Genies also has tools that use Gen AI to create and optimize avatars.
Genies
The system structures each companion around four core dimensions: Looks, Brain, Behavior, and Play. Once created, avatars can engage fans directly, produce social media content through Genies’ AR camera, and participate in fan co-creation events via its digital goods studio. Because every companion is game-ready, they can move beyond chat into playable spaces built with Unity.
In my earlier interview, Nigam described that integration as key to making AI companions part of everyday life. “If you want people to fall in love with AI personas, they need to be something you can feel, connect with, and grow alongside,” he said. “Real friends aren’t chat boxes. They’re expressive, visually present, and playfully interactive.”
Genies’ broader goal is to make these companions interoperable across apps and platforms, from mobile games to mixed reality environments. Behind the entertainment focus is a technical ambition: to become the universal avatar framework for AI agents. “The brain is being solved,” Nigam said. “What’s missing is the interface—what people emotionally connect to.”
The company’s investors include Disney CEO Bob Iger, Silver Lake, Bond, and NEA. Its partners span major talent groups and global IP that remain undisclosed. For them, the appeal is creative. Each AI character is a managed, monetizable digital identity that evolves with its human counterpart and enables large-scale, interactive fan engagement. Rather than focusing on protection, the new Genies offering embraces a new form of identity built for modern audiences.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2025/11/04/genies-brings-ai-character-tools-to-hollywood-giving-talent-ownership-in-the-age-of-ai/
