Scott Sutton is CEO of Later, a leading social media marketing platform, guiding its strategy and operations to help brands grow online.
AI isn’t coming for the creator economy—it’s already here. Marketers need to think about what this means for their campaigns, ROI and the creators they partner with. The real advantage in this new reality isn’t just speed, it’s who owns the data that powers every creator partnership and campaign decision.
I’ve spent the past few years watching AI move from a curiosity to a daily tool for both brands and creators. Creators use it to accelerate content production, and brands use it to accelerate insights and decision-making. The biggest shift is speed: creators can now produce, test and iterate content at a pace humans alone couldn’t match.
In this new landscape, speed matters most when it’s paired with data that guides every strategic choice. Social algorithms are evolving quickly to handle the influx of content, making the signals derived from performance—from engagement and conversions to audience sentiment and brand safety—more critical than ever. Marketers who capture and leverage this data can turn AI into a strategic partner, guiding smarter and more measurable campaigns.
Standing Out In An AI-Powered Feed
Creators are already using AI to enhance and accelerate content creation, from editing and voiceovers to predictive trend spotting. As content volume explodes, algorithms are evolving to surface what truly resonates, and this is where marketers’ proprietary data becomes the differentiator.
AI can generate content, but it can’t optimize strategy without the right signals. Brands that collect and control their own performance data, from engagement and conversions to audience sentiment and brand safety, will be able to guide AI more intelligently. By feeding AI insights from past campaigns, marketers can evaluate creators across multiple criteria, including performance, brand safety, audience fit and sentiment, to optimize strategies faster than ever. In this way, AI helps marketers spend smarter and measure ROI with confidence.
Building The Chess Engine Of Marketing
Think of AI as building a chess engine for marketing, powered by proprietary brand and performance data. Just as chess engines calculate possible moves in a game of chess before recommending the strongest one, AI can analyze creator performance, platform dynamics, audience behavior and budget scenarios to recommend the smartest plays grounded in your own data. This helps marketing teams spend far more time—in some cases over 50% more—on the parts of the job that move the needle, like strategy, creative collaboration and campaign optimization, while AI ensures every decision is informed by the best available data.
For example, it could identify a mid-tier creator with strong audience loyalty on TikTok as a better investment than a higher-cost influencer on Instagram or it could find that diversifying ad spend across multiple micro-creators yields stronger long-term engagement than betting everything on a single collaborator. AI won’t replace creative intuition, but it can give marketers precision and foresight that’s impossible to get from gut feeling alone.
A New Wave Of Creativity
AI has been helping creators elevate their businesses through accelerated content creation and now it’s time for brands to use AI for long-term optimization. Technology has always expanded what’s possible in creative industries: photography didn’t replace painting, digital tools didn’t erase music, and sampling didn’t kill musical artistry. Each one initially raised fears about replacing human skill, but ultimately expanded what was possible. AI is the next tool in that tradition. Used thoughtfully, it can help creators experiment with new formats, tell better stories and connect more deeply with their audiences.
Speed alone is no longer the differentiator. Brands that own their data, measure what matters and apply AI strategically will gain the competitive advantage. By combining authentic creators with data-driven AI insights, marketers can not only navigate the noise but shape the future of the creator economy, turning influence into a predictable, scalable and measurable growth channel.
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