Jennifer Prosek, founder of PR firm Prosek Partners, discussed "digital winks" in an interview with Molly O'Shea at the New York Stock Exchange. Before meetings, fundraising, or transactions, parties input names into ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, or Claude, and the model provides a collage summary as a new first impression, which she considers the first call of due diligence.

With over 20 years in the industry, Prosek's clients include private equity, asset management, banking, venture capital, and technology, with a total managed asset of approximately $70 trillion and company revenue around $175 million. The interview also covered cases involving Ken Griffin and Citadel, Ray Dalio and Bridgewater, Blackstone, Apollo, Meta, as well as figures like Jensen Huang and Elon Musk; over 75% of negative reports originate from employees; a single podcast episode has generated about $17 million in costs; brand budgets range from about $250,000 to $10 million. She cited an example where she almost declined a call from a manager with around $10 billion in assets because they "looked thin" in the model, only to later discover it was a young founder managing about $9 billion, with outdated and inaccurate online profiles.

The model pulls from media, professional networks, interviews, podcasts, resumes, and other public texts. When the corpus is thin, contradictory, or outdated, gaps are filled by the model using available fragments, and the snapshot is not neutral. The countermeasure is to continuously repeat the labels by which you are currently recognized, allowing the model to lock onto these words rather than outdated or unflattering old news. She has created word clouds to confirm that searches return target attributes like "entrepreneur" and "connector." Company partner Dan Allocca wrote about the same logic for alternative asset managers in 2025: prompt words replace searches, and when investors ask "who is this company," they receive a collage written as a conclusion, missing nodes or erroneous content can directly harm fundraising.

This episode of Sourcery was recorded at the exchange, with a timestamp specifically noting "looking forward to your digital wink." Venture capital is increasingly thought of in terms of media companies; excessive exposure can harm brands; repair paths include knowing when to retaliate and when to remain silent. The AI industry itself is also portrayed as having a reputation issue, with the model serving as both a communication tool and a managed object.

In market mechanisms, this is a recharging of reputation infrastructure, not securities transactions. Buyers are limited partners, counterparties, and journalists before fundraising; the seller, Prosek, sells "momentum content" that can be referenced by the model. Funds flow from brand and crisis budgets to podcasts, homepages, and structured announcements. Beneficiaries are managers with thick corpora and stable labels; those under pressure are founders with thin public texts or those whose names are occupied by old cases on the homepage. Due diligence has shifted from databases and phone calls to three paragraphs returned by prompt words.

Additional data: Allocca suggests conducting brand audits for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. Startups, having thinner search footprints, find their fundraising documents treated as indexed fuel for maximum leverage. Once a model impression is set, interviews state it is extremely difficult to rewrite.

Source: Public information