Interviewer: Hello and welcome to The AI Summit London. I’m joined by Benjamin Woollams, Founder and CEO of TrueRights. Could you start by sharing a bit about your background and how TrueRights came to be?

Ben: I came from the influencer space and worked at Influencer.com for almost a decade, very early in the creator economy. I joined as the third employee and stayed through to around 150 people, moving from account executive into global partnerships and then commercial director. It was an exciting time: we were educating global CMOs on what influencers were, how they could represent a brand, and how to give creators the creative license to make content that resonated.

In global partnerships, I advised social platforms on building creator communities, how to get more creators making content on TikTok, how to encourage monetisation, and how to drive adoption of new features like Live, shoppable experiences, or Reels. We also became a production partner that facilitated media spend with creators. That’s really where TrueRights began: advertisers were buying content from us to repurpose as ads on social platforms, and to do that, they needed to license the rights.

We saw significant rights being purchased, but there was no underlying technical infrastructure to support better licensing frameworks, things like fair pricing, monitoring, being paid what’s owed, and visibility into where and how content is distributed. Toward the end of my time at Influencer.com, I was advising TikTok heavily on TikTok Symphony, an all‑in‑one AI tool that lets advertisers create content with digital avatars in seconds. For a production-based influencer agency, that’s a direct competitive shift. TikTok asked: how do we put a person’s face and likeness, or brand IP and logos, into content with consent, control, and compensation at scale? That’s the licensing framework this new AI world requires.

We started building for that reality, solving existing issues around content rights licensing and, crucially, licensing a person’s face and likeness ethically and transparently.

Interviewer: Where does human creative direction have the most leverage in AI‑enabled campaigns—and how do you scale it without diluting a brand’s voice?

Ben: You’ve always got to have a human involved. Human insight is essential for resonance, community, and building brand affinity. Our Chief Product Officer describes himself as a creative technologist and talks about “ideas not included”, a twist on “batteries not included.” Technology and AI let us all become creative technologists, but the idea still has to come from humans. You must add inspiration and context; then AI scales and optimises it at speeds we’ve never seen. The human element remains central and always will.

Interviewer: At enterprise scale, how do you enforce AI rights across partners and platforms?

Ben: It’s difficult and it’s what we’re focused on. The challenge is standardisation. Policymakers are progressing, and guardrails are emerging, but enforcement must be technical as well as legal. We need partnerships and technology that can monitor, find, identify, and attribute uses—and then inform and enforce the rights that have been agreed.

Five years ago, licensing looked like a one-to-one contract: you sign, you get the asset, and you run it. Today, licensing starts with registering rights and runs all the way through to enforcement and earnings. We’ve mapped that as a multi‑step process. It’s far more technical and dependent on enforcement mechanisms, not just brokerage. From an enterprise standpoint, you also need buy‑in, partnerships and integrations that make the ecosystem interoperable.

Interviewer: Getting granular: how do you define, verify, and safeguard a “digital twin” versus a general likeness and who controls against misuse?

Ben: We built TrueRights to provide infrastructure for rights holders to own and manage their digital identity and rights. We started with creators, but that includes brands, actors, musicians, athletes, anyone with valuable IP. Whether it’s a digital twin or non‑twin AI content, we aim to be the system in the middle that gives visibility and control over usage.

Part of the reason we started this was what we saw in the generative AI tool landscape. Imagine David Beckham: to participate across platforms, he’d have to sign up to each one, opt in, upload datasets, agree to multiple codes of conduct and platform policies, accept different payment terms, and then monitor deals and usage across all of them. What if Nike wants to work with him on one platform and Adidas on another? Now imagine a talent manager or union overseeing hundreds of talent. It becomes nearly impossible. Our goal is to consolidate rights, consent, and enforcement—so rights holders and their representatives have a single, scalable way to manage and protect likeness and IP across the ecosystem.

We aim to be an agnostic partner in the middle, facilitating better AI for digital twins and ensuring access is governed by the talent’s consent.

Verification is crucial. For us, licensing starts with a rights registry: registering what you own, proving you own it, and clarifying what your IP now comprises. It’s not just your content any more. In discussions around TikTok Symphony, that scope included your height, weight, personal attributes, eye colour, ethnicity, the way you walk and the way you talk.

I had a fascinating conversation with Terry Crews of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, about intellectual property and personality rights, and how, in this new era of AI, we’re moving towards “intellectual personality”. The market is evolving quickly, but verification is the first step.

Interviewer: Turning to the finance side, with licensing and subscription structures and best‑converting AI‑accelerated content, what have you seen in your experience, and how should royalties and reporting flows work?

Ben: We have an opportunity to rewrite the rulebook. Music offers a useful precedent: collection societies and clearing houses pay artists based on exposure. I upload my tracks, they’re played in a public setting, and I’m paid accordingly. What we’re seeing now is an evolution of that model. It’s less about collection societies managing and distributing funds, and more about rights holders striking their own deals and understanding what a fair price looks like.

We envisage that AI will create a surplus of content, and advertisers, the ones with the budgets, will drive changes in how payments work. It isn’t realistic to expect brands to pay upfront for 50 assets without knowing how they’ll perform from a media point of view. If we build robust monitoring, we can pay for performance based on exposure. For this new era of AI content that might include your likeness or mine, the goal is to let advertisers deploy it in media mixes, then accurately attribute exposure and pay royalties accordingly, borrowing from music’s mechanisms, but on the talent’s and creator’s terms.

Interviewer: Picking up on what you said earlier, it’s not just about reselling content. What are your no‑go criteria in the validation steps before a prototype goes into production?

Ben: These deals are already being struck. The first issue in AI and media is training data. Many creatives, photographers, musicians, and others, have had their work scraped and used for training. That’s happened, but I don’t think it’s commercially sustainable in the long term. Tools are becoming more self‑sufficient, or they’re finding cleaner, cheaper ways to source content.

For generative content that uses someone’s likeness, production examples already exist. I believe Adidas’ recent World Cup campaign brought legacy footballers like Zinedine Zidane and David Beckham back via AI, interacting with kids in street‑football settings, echoing those classic PepsiCo ads. So we’ve moved beyond prototype, but not yet to scale. Some platforms are building their own marketplaces, which helps to a point, but the real unlock is interoperability.

You need an integration layer so all systems have clarity on rights usage, permissions, consent, and the agreed framework for what’s fair when creatives work with AI. When those systems are in place, you’ll see scale, because it addresses not only the talent side, but also buyer‑side compliance: do I have the rights, is there any copyright involved, am I infringing IP? No advertiser wants to end up in a legal battle.

Closing

Benjamin Woollams is the Founder and CEO of TrueRights, the only platform that enables brands and AI platforms to safely and ethically license talent likeness for generative AI advertising. TrueRights protects creators while unlocking scalable, transparent content usage, giving advertisers a seamless way to source, license, and manage talent IP with full legal clarity. 

Prior to founding TrueRights, Ben was Commercial Director at Influencer.com, where, as one of the earliest members, he helped grow the company into one of the world’s leading influencer marketing agencies. It was there that he recognised the urgent need for better governance around content and IP as AI began reshaping the industry.