Genies brings AI character tools to Hollywood, giving talent ownership in the age of AI

Genies, the Los Angeles-based AI company, today introduced a suite of tools that help celebrities and talent agencies create and manage interactive digital versions of themselves. The AI ​​Companion Talent Creation Tools allow entertainment, music and sports organizations to train expressive, engine-ready avatars that can engage in one-on-one conversations with fans while retaining ownership of likeness and personality rights.

The launch builds on Genies’ previous announcement with Unity and extends its tools to a broader ecosystem for developers, agencies and IP owners. Genies’ technology was built to power expressive, engine-ready avatars and now connects those same developer capabilities with a framework for IP-driven AI companions and party-based games through the Unity partnership. Together, these tools enable major IP holders to bring their properties to life through intelligent characters and new forms of fan engagement. As Nigam described, Genies “builds the visual layer for large language models,” making AI something people can see, play with, and relate to. That vision now extends to Hollywood, where organizations can securely manage digital identity at scale and generate thousands of engine-ready avatars through Genies’ car generation technology.

Recent months have seen a flurry of unauthorized celebrity likenesses on 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 unauthorized use of similarities,” said Jake Becker, Director of Business Development and Strategy at Genies, “the need for control and protection has never been greater.”

The new tools allow talent agencies to replicate entire rosters of artists and athletes. Each individual can then manage their own AI companion through a private portal. Avatars can chat, send emos and appear in apps and games. Using the Genies creation stack, talent can automatically generate an avatar from a single photo, train its personality through recorded content, and deploy it in interactive experiences.

The system structures each companion around four core dimensions: appearance, 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 through the digital goods studio. With each companion ready for the game, they can go beyond chatting and into playable spaces built with Unity.

In my earlier interview, Nigam described that integration as the key to making AI companions part of everyday life. “If you want people to fall in love with AI personas, they have to be something you can empathize with, connect with and grow with,” he said. “Real friends are not chat boxes. They are expressive, visually present and playfully interactive.”

The broader goal of Genies is to make these companions interoperable across apps and platforms, from mobile games to mixed reality environments. Behind the focus on entertainment lies a technical ambition: to become the universal avatar framework for AI agents. “The brain is being dissolved,” Nigam said. “What’s missing is the interface – what people connect to emotionally.”

The company’s investors include Disney CEO Bob Iger, Silver Lake, Bond and NEA. The partners include major talent groups and global intellectual property that are not made public. For them, the appeal is creative. Each AI character is a curated digital identity that monetizes and 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 a modern audience.