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25-08-2026  |  Article

The current fascination with AI influencers

First it was influencers, then UGC creators. Now it’s AI influencers. As a digital marketing agency, we stay ahead of shifts like this one — it’s part of the job. That means testing the hype ourselves, good and bad, before we’d ever bring it to a client as a genuine recommendation.

And the fascination is real, not just ours. According to Statista, at least every second person aged 18-54 in the US follows a virtual influencer, and even among those 55 and older, 26% do too — highlighting how far this reaches across generations, not just the younger ones you’d expect. That’s not a fringe habit — it’s a format most of the internet has already encountered, whether they clocked it or not.

That’s what led us to properly interrogate what building an AI influencer would actually take — what it could deliver, and where it would come up short. What follows is worth reading before you make that call yourself.

What a virtual influencer actually is (and isn't)

It’s worth being precise about what these things actually are, because “virtual influencer,” “digital influencer” and “AI influencer” get used interchangeably, and they’re not the same thing. The difference lies in how each one is created, or what it’s capable of.

Virtual influencer / digital influencer — the broader category. A digital entity built using CGI, artificial intelligence, motion capture, or some combination of the three, operating on social media and digital platforms in an influencer role.

AI influencer — a virtual influencer whose appearance, content or behaviour is generated or significantly driven by artificial intelligence. This is currently the most common form active on social media.

AI Autonomous Virtual Influencer — a virtual influencer with AI agent capabilities built in, able to perform tasks for followers beyond social platforms, in direct follower-influencer interactions.

CGI influencer — a virtual character built primarily through traditional computer-generated imagery and animation, usually with heavier manual production. More common in earlier years and in niche sectors such as gaming.

Digital twin — a digital replica of a real person or object. In a social media context, this usually means an AI-generated version of an existing human creator or model.

Hybrid approaches — a combination of human and digital elements: a real person enhanced by AI, or a virtual character controlled in real time by a human operator.

It’s also worth separating virtual influencers from AI systems, virtual assistants or chatbots that happen to have a visual form. On the surface, these can look similar — an avatar, public communication — but their primary function is operational: providing information, handling tasks, supporting processes, rather than building an audience and exerting social influence. That puts them in a different category. Albania’s AI virtual minister, Diella, is a useful example: a public-facing avatar that communicates, but its role is functional rather than influencer-driven.

What virtual influencers have in common

Whichever type they are, virtual influencers tend to share the same core traits:

  • Their visual form is limited only by the imagination of their creators — human-like, anime-inspired, cartoon-like, or even animal figures.
  • They’re anthropomorphic: given human traits, shapes, emotions or actions, even when built on non-human forms like animals, gods, robots, or objects.
  • They have distinctive personalities.
  • They exist within a digital environment, in the social dimension.
  • They’re actively creating, producing, sharing, streaming and disseminating content across media and digital platforms — engaging their audience with the goal of exerting social influence.
  • While the influencer itself is artificial, the content it generates is real and often interactive.

What an AI influencer can realistically deliver

The honest answer is: quite a lot, but not evenly across every stage, and not without trade-offs. Here’s what it’s actually useful for at each stage of the funnel. Worth noting upfront: a lot of this doubles as entertainment too — brands use AI influencers for pure content and showmanship, not just funnel-specific tasks.

Awareness

    • Act as a spokesperson, brand face or digital brand ambassador.
    • Support product launches and brand promotions.
    • Test identities, aesthetics, messaging angles or narratives at small scale before committing to a bigger campaign.

Consideration

    • Educate — showing how products work together, like a full skincare routine or a styled outfit, so recommendations feel natural rather than pushy.
    • Answer customer questions.
    • Handle product visualisation, without the logistics of shoots, model coordination or sample shipping.

Purchase

    • Run promotional campaigns.
    • Deliver product endorsements and testimonials to boost credibility and conversion.
    • Run interactive formats — polls, quizzes, contests — to lift engagement.

Retention

  • Keep the relationship going after purchase with personalised thank-you videos, usage tips, or loyalty updates — without needing a real person.

Where an AI influencer can actually show up

The short answer is: almost anywhere a human creator or spokesperson would. A few categories worth knowing:

Organic and paid digital channels

    • Social media
    • Websites
    • Ads
    • E-commerce
    • Email marketing
    • Digital campaigns

Synchronous formats

    • Live-streaming, gaming and podcasts — real-time formats where the persona interacts as it goes, rather than in pre-produced content.

Cross-media

    • Video games, films and series — increasingly, personas built for social media are crossing into these formats rather than staying confined to a feed.

Physical spaces

    • Concerts, festivals and other in-person venues — the newest frontier, where a virtual persona shows up somewhere audiences physically are.

Why brands are turning to an AI influencer

Long-term asset value. A traditional influencer is paid for temporary promotion that disappears the moment the campaign ends. An AI influencer works differently: once built, it’s a digital asset the brand owns outright, and every new piece of content adds to that asset rather than resetting the investment.

Availability and scalability. No travel restrictions, exclusivity clauses or scheduling conflicts — the same persona can appear across geographies and time zones at once, adapting language and cultural references without recasting for each market.

Brand safety and control. An AI influencer can’t post something off-brand at 2am, get caught in a scandal, or show up in a competitor’s campaign next month. Every word and every pixel stays exactly as the brand designed it — permanently.

Full ownership. No borrowed audience, no rate renegotiation as follower count grows, no risk of losing the face of the brand to a rival deal — the persona is company property, full stop.

Cost and speed. The marginal cost of each new piece of content drops below what a human booking costs, once the persona is built. Iteration is faster too: a new background, outfit or setting can be regenerated in minutes rather than rebriefed and reshot.

Beyond these five, the same face across every touchpoint keeps things consistent without creator turnover to manage. A persona can appear in impossible settings, wear clothing that hasn’t been manufactured yet, or demonstrate products in stylised worlds that would be prohibitively expensive to build physically, which opens up real creative freedom. 

It also naturally stands out and reads as more innovative than a templated campaign, and it’s a good match for formats and concepts that would be genuinely hard for a human creator to pull off. 

Reach works differently too: a human influencer partnership gives access to their existing audience but rarely much beyond it, while an AI influencer isn’t borrowing anyone’s following, so it can draw attention outside any pre-built audience. 

Where an AI influencer falls short

Lack of lived experience. This is the core limitation everything else stems from. If a virtual persona says “I love this moisturiser, it changed my skin,” the claim is inherently hollow — the persona has no skin, so there’s no experience behind the endorsement, however convincing the delivery is. The lack of lived experience also carries through into weaker emotional connection more broadly. Followers can’t quite envy a virtual character the way they envy a human one, and the spontaneity and imperfection that make a real creator relatable are hard to fake convincingly.

Audience scepticism. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, 36.7% of marketers are concerned about the lack of authenticity in AI-powered influencers. That scepticism isn’t spread evenly — sectors where trust and credibility drive the purchase decision, like healthcare, financial services and personal wellness, face a steeper climb than lifestyle or entertainment brands do.

Disclosure and the trust question. Being upfront about using AI matters more than how convincing the persona is. Meta, TikTok and YouTube have all introduced or expanded labelling requirements for AI-generated content, and the pattern in the data is consistent: audiences don’t punish disclosed AI content nearly as hard as marketers expect. The backlash comes from getting caught concealing it, not from the disclosure itself.

So, hype or a useful tool?

AI influencers represent a genuinely new direction at the intersection of technology and storytelling. But their value isn’t in replacing human connection — it’s in how a brand chooses to use them with intention. The real opportunity lies in crafting personas engaging and considered enough to feel meaningful to the people encountering them.

Used with purpose, an AI influencer can become more than a promotional tool or entertainment. It can be a character that builds lasting connection and deepens how a brand sits in an audience’s mind. Used without purpose, it’s just an expensive way to chase a trend.

So if you’re weighing whether an AI influencer belongs in your own content plan, the filter that actually matters is this: does it serve a real need, or is it mainly novelty?

And if the answer is yes, the direction worth watching is the AI Autonomous Virtual Influencer — personas with agent capabilities built in, able to do more than influence, moving between the digital and physical world. And if you’re still in doubt, just ask yourself —

Would you follow your brand’s AI influencer, and why? The answer tends to say more than any market report can.

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