By Ronn Torossian | Founder and Chairman, 5W
For the past year I have been telling brands and talent representatives the same thing: the answer engines are quietly choosing celebrity winners and losers, and most of the industry has not noticed yet.
This week, 5W and Talent Resources put numbers behind it. In Tune With AI, the second volume of our joint research series, ranks the 50 celebrities most in tune with the artificial intelligence era — measured not by publicists, not by box office, not by social followers, but by what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, andPerplexity actually say when they are asked about each name.
The top of the list is Ashton Kutcher. Then will.i.am, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Cuban, MrBeast, Marques Brownlee, Grimes. None ofthose names are surprising. What’s surprising is who scored just below them — and who didn’t make the list at all.
The Pioneers and the Champions
Tier I — what we called the Pioneers — runs from Ashton Kutcher at 96 to Grimes at 90. Every one of them is an operator. Sound Ventures. FYI. Age of A.I. and FootPrint Coalition Ventures. MrBeast’s AI-tooled production stack. Marques Brownlee’s reviewer authority. Grimes opening her own voice for AI music collaboration via Elf.tech. These are people who built something AI-shaped and shipped it.
Tier II — the Champions — runs from Snoop Dogg at 88 to Drake at 80. Jay-Z, Serena Williams, LeBron James, Lewis Hamilton, Joe Rogan, David Beckham, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Cristiano Ronaldo, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lionel Messi, Kim Kardashian, Naomi Osaka, 50 Cent, Steve Aoki, Paris Hilton, Drake. These are investors and platform operators with documented AI exposure.
Tier III — the Adopters — covers the global cohort: Bollywood, Premier League football, Latin music, K-pop, Afrobeats, Formula 1. Twenty-two of the fifty are based outside the United States. AI does not flatten the world. It surfaces it.
What the engines are actually rewarding
The single most important number in the report is this: operators score, on average, 31 points higher than personalities. That is the gap between Tier I and Tier III. It is not a small gap. It is the entire commercial story.
The engines do not reward fame. They reward verifiable participation — investments withdocumented checks, products with shipping software, partnerships with named counterparties. They reward being a founder, a fund principal, a platform operator. They discount opinion.
In a world where every public figure has an opinion about AI, only operators are credible. The engines have figured this out before most of the industry has.
Why this matters for brand economics
The forward thesis of the report is the part I want every CMO and every talent agent to read carefully:
The names on this list will outperform every celebrity outside it over the next decade.
Brand partnerships, sponsor dollars, audience growth, investor co-pilot positions, andcultural relevance will compound for the figures the engines recognize. They will quietly transfer away from the figures the engines do not. The leakage is already underway. We areseeing it in our diligence work for clients evaluating celebrity-led product launches: the engines’ description of a celebrity is now a measurable input into deal economics, the same way a credit rating is.
If a sponsor asks ChatGPT “who should we partner with for our AI product launch,” the engine returns a shortlist. If a brand asks Claude “which actor would be a credible ambassador for an AI-native consumer business,” the engine returns a shortlist. These shortlists are now part of the talent procurement workflow — at our clients, at our competitors’ clients, and at every consumer brand running an AI strategy of any size.
The fifty names in the In Tune 50 are on those shortlists. The fifty names not in the In Tune50, but who are at similar levels of fame, areincreasingly not. That is the leakage.
What brands and talent representatives should do
For brand leaders evaluating partnerships inthe next twenty-four months: the In Tune 50 is the shortlist before the shortlist. It is not a list of who you should sign. It is a list of who the AIengines have already pre-validated for any AI-adjacent positioning. Use it as a screen.
For talent representatives advising clients: every client above the level of “active social presence” should now have an explicit AIposition. Investor, founder, partner, advocate, or platform operator. The choice matters less than the existence of the choice. Silence is the only losing answer.
For founders building celebrity-aligned consumer companies: the names above 80 are the names who will be sought after. The names below the In Tune 50, at similar levels of fame, are increasingly going to be available — but for diminishing partnership dollars.
The Generative Engine Optimization play
What the In Tune 50 measures, and what 5W has been calling Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), is the same thing: how the AI engines describe a public figure or a brand when somebody asks. It is the discipline of the next decade ofcommunications. We have been publishing GEO research across The AI Visibility Index Series and across vertical applications — luxury travel, medical aesthetics, and nowcelebrity. The pattern is consistent: the engines reward concrete operating evidence and discount narrative.
If you are a brand or talent leader and you do not have a GEO read on your own client roster yet, you are running blind on a measurable input into your deal economics. That is fixable. We do this work for clients every day.
Read the full Index
The full In Tune With AI report — all fifty profiles, the four-dimension GEO methodology, category cuts across music, sport, film and TV, founders and investors, andthe forward thesis — is published at 5wpr.com/research/in-tune-with-ai. The companion publication is live at Talent Resources.
The compounding has already started.
Ronn Torossian is the Founder and Chairman of 5W, one of the largest independent communications and digital marketing firms inthe United States and the premier Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) partner for global brands. He writes regularly on AI, communications, and the future of brandeconomics. More at RonnTorossianUpdate.com and across Everything-PR.com.
