Bruce Ryder closed out 2025 by taking home Best AI Influencer at the Australian AI Festival Awards, with Tech Business News reporting that the honour recognised the exceptional real-world engagement generated by the Australian AI celebrity, beating out several high-profile international AI influencers for the title. The category sat alongside a wider list of winners spanning AI startups, enterprise platforms, music, animation and individual excellence, with festival director Matt Kirby noting that the depth and volume of entries across every category far exceeded what organisers had expected going in.
For Miss Em, Creator of Bruce Ryder, the win landed as a full-circle moment on a two-year build. Bruce first landed in 2024, built to kick some life into the Ducks Nuts Balls brand and lighten a feed that was growing darker by the day. What followed was less a project than an obsession, nights turned into months as Emma taught herself the technology at speed, building the architecture of Bruce’s character and world from scratch. Somewhere in that process, she found something she hadn’t expected: a global community of equally curious, equally committed creators, all racing toward the same new era of entertainment.
The thread she pulled two years ago wove itself into a genuinely unusual run of firsts, the first AI to present live on stage alongside a human, a sold-out product line, a casting in an AI film, a merch line, a bio-pic that became a film festival finalist, a produced show, and now, this. The catchphrase Emma wrote for Bruce back at his Ducks Nuts launch has become the ethos of the entire ride, and feels especially fitting today:
“You gotta loosen up, kid. Life’s a wild ride. Just jump in and grab it by the balls.”
Emma extended thanks to the Australian AI Festival, and to Halim Alrasihi — the original generative AI collaborator who helped build Bruce’s first model back at the very beginning of the project.
Read the full award announcement via Tech Business News: International and Local Australian AI Dominate at the Australian AI Festival 2025 Awards.