Everything-PR just published The AI Communications 100 — the inaugural ranked index of the 100 figures shaping what ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews retrieve, cite, and refuse to discuss. Editorial. No payment for inclusion. Annual refresh in Q1.

Publisher's note · Ronn Torossian

The list is built around ten lanes — lab principals, answer engines, policy, public critics, open-source, journalists, safety, discovery infrastructure, investors, and the foundations the engines were trained on. Each lane is a structural pressure point on the answer the chatbox returns to a buyer. The 1–100 reflects relative influence on that answer.

Three names worth your attention

Three Israelis sit inside the 100. Ilya Sutskever at #11 — co-founder and chief scientist of Safe Superintelligence Inc., raised in Jerusalem. Boaz Barak at #78 — Weizmann, Harvard, now safety lead at OpenAI. Edo Liberty at #82 — Tel Aviv University, founder of Pinecone, the vector database underneath most enterprise AI retrieval. The model, the safety layer, and the retrieval anchor. A small country, three of the hundred seats.

Why this matters

More than a third of consumers now begin product research inside an AI engine. The buyer no longer walks past your billboard, your search ad, or your homepage. The buyer asks a chatbox. The chatbox composes an answer. The 100 people on this list disproportionately determine what that answer says.

If you run communications, marketing, or growth at any consumer or B2B business in 2026, the AI Communications 100 is the org chart of the people whose decisions move your visibility. Read it like a map.

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Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.