AI & Infrastructure for Influencer Marketing Growth

AI is revolutionizing creator marketing by addressing critical infrastructure gaps and enhancing the ability to identify, manage, and measure influencer campaigns. As brands increasingly invest in creator partnerships, the lack of a standardized tech stack has become a significant challenge, hindering efficiency and scalability.

According to Deloitte Digital’s 2025 State of Social Research, creators now account for nearly a quarter of all social media budgets. This shift underscores the urgent need for effective systems to manage and optimize these investments. AI is emerging as a key solution, enabling brands to treat creator marketing as a core business function rather than an experimental side project.

AI Closing the Infrastructure Gap

At the recent Digital Entertainment World conference, industry experts discussed how AI is transforming creator marketing infrastructure. By automating repetitive tasks and providing actionable insights, AI helps brands manage creator campaigns with the same precision as other core marketing functions.

Evolving Creator Discovery

One of the most significant advancements is AI’s role in creator discovery. Traditional manual searches are giving way to AI-driven tools that analyze content, sentiment, and audience behavior to identify the most relevant creators. Olivia McNaughten, Head of Marketing at Grin, noted that AI can assess performance, content style, sentiment, and audience match, generating a shortlist of creators aligned with specific campaign goals.

While AI excels at evaluating performance metrics, human judgment remains essential for assessing the intangible aspects of creator partnerships, such as compatibility and potential challenges. AI’s ability to handle repetitive tasks frees marketers to focus on building relationships and shaping creative strategies.

Centralizing Creator Data

Creator data is often fragmented across multiple platforms, spreadsheets, and tools, making it difficult to track performance and build on successful strategies. Taylor Rodriguez, Global VP of Customer Experience at Traackr, highlighted the importance of centralizing creator data to make it searchable and actionable. Jacob Clark, VP of Customer Success at Aspire, emphasized the need to treat creator relationship data like customer data, enabling brands to track partnership history and identify future opportunities.

Layering AI on top of centralized data provides even deeper insights, allowing brands to develop more innovative and tailored strategies. This approach ensures that creator marketing efforts are data-driven and aligned with overall business objectives.

Analyzing Content Performance

With the explosion of content creation, AI is playing a crucial role in analyzing content performance. Bill Stanton, Head of Enterprise Sales at Later, noted that the sheer volume of content is changing how performance is measured. Traditional metrics may no longer be relevant, and AI helps identify the signals that matter most.

Nate Harris, VP of Product Innovation at CreatorIQ, stressed the importance of understanding why content works and for whom. AI helps identify patterns in performance data, revealing what kind of content drives action and for which audiences. This turns performance analysis into a strategic advantage, enabling brands to optimize creative, distribution, and targeting efforts.

Scaling Strategy with AI

Steph Money, SVP at Edelman AI, emphasized that AI’s true value lies in its ability to scale strategy, not just execution. By connecting creator discovery, relationship management, and performance analysis, AI transforms creator marketing into a continuous, data-driven function. This approach positions creator marketing as a long-term growth engine rather than a series of one-off campaigns.

Harris added that optimized systems allow creators to focus on content creation while brands learn from that content. This symbiotic relationship ensures that both creators and brands benefit from AI-driven insights and processes.

The Need for Infrastructure

While AI is accelerating the possibilities in creator marketing, infrastructure remains critical. Many brands are still operating in a trial-and-error mode, lacking the dedicated tech stack needed to support learning, measurement, and scaling. Speakers from Traackr, Grin, Aspire, Later, and CreatorIQ agreed that without a clear system, even the best creative strategies will fall short.

The brands that succeed in this evolving landscape will be those that invest in infrastructure and refine their systems with each campaign. AI provides the tools to bridge the infrastructure gap, but brands must be willing to embrace these technologies and integrate them into their marketing strategies.