This analysis is based on proprietary data collected from our audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It is available to Digiday+ subscribers.
Earlier this month, Digiday+ Research reported that advertisers are embracing AI for social media and retail media marketing. However, advertisers are slower to adopt AI for influencer and connected TV (CTV) marketing. This is according to a Digiday+ Research survey of more than 100 marketing professionals in the first quarter of 2026.
Only one quarter of marketers (25%) said they use AI for their influencer marketing work, according to the survey.
One reason for this reluctance is consumer demand for authenticity from influencers. According to an April 2025 study by the World Federation of Advertisers, 96% of brands that have no plans to work with virtual influencers cite consumer trust issues as their reasons for caution.
Unlike human influencers, virtual influencers are AI-generated avatars whose appearance, content and actions are fine-tuned by an individual or group of people behind the scenes, similar to virtual influencer Mia Zel who went viral with a Wimbledon-inspired post last year.
Among the 25% of marketers who said they are using AI in their work with influencers, the majority (75%) said they use AI to analyze data. More than half said they use AI to create content (63%) and for influencer outreach (56%).
Skincare brand Beekman 1802 partnered with AI analytics firm Bezel to analyze its vast amounts of first-party data. By feeding CRM and Shopify insights into large language models, Baker’s team uncovered customer personas that now guide everything from campaign strategy to product messaging.
“We were able to throw all of our data at a large language model and really understand deeply who this person is and how many subtypes of customer we have,” Beekman 1802’s chief digital officer David Baker said at Digiday, Glossy and Modern Retail’s AI Marketing Solutions virtual event in October 2025.
Independent influencer agency Later uses an AI system to discover human creators that brands may want to work with. The tool matches campaign briefs with influencers and predicts potential content performance based on historical engagement data. “That’s a much richer picture that gives me confidence that I’m going to get a high ROAS on my campaign,” Later CEO Scott Sutton told Digiday in March.
Sutton noted that the shift reflects the realities of today’s market, where brands partner with a large number of creators to compete for visibility on social platforms, and manual campaign management isn’t sustainable. “Increasingly brands want to work with more creators,” he said. “The mechanics of running creative programs in a highly effective way require you to use more influencers — typically, smaller to mid-size influencers — in a more targeted way.”
Influencers are also using AI to find brand opportunities and streamline work processes. According to a report from Wondercraft, 80% of creators use AI at some point in their workflow.
Creator app POP.STORE recently launched its AI ECHO ME program, an agentic commerce platform designed to help creators identify revenue opportunities, generate content and engage with fans. POP.STORE CEO Gautam Goswami told Digiday in May that the platform can connect to an influencer’s social media account, scan through DMs, and ultimately emails, to determine whether a message is coming from a brand or a creator. It can identify their size, and whether the message has a clear monetary proposition.
“Creators tend to be chickens with their heads cut off running around all day long, and within that craziness, trying to come up with creative ideas and shoot great content and constantly worried that they’ll get lost in the algorithm,” Goswami said, alleging that creators have told him that “80% of DMs go unanswered.”
Marketers Use AI for CTV Less Than for Other Channels
When Digiday asked marketers whether they are using AI in their CTV campaigns, the vast majority of survey respondents (82%) said they are not using AI for advertising in streaming.
That is a stark contrast to other channels like social media and retail media, where 49% and 42% of marketers, respectively, told Digiday they were using AI for advertising.
“AI adoption in CTV has historically lagged because TV was built on a broadcast mindset, whereas social media was built on data,” Brian Albert, YouTube’s managing director of U.S. video solutions and creative works, said in an email for Digiday’s 2026 guide to CTV in May.
However, CTV has become significantly more addressable over the last several years, with advertisers increasingly able to target households and audience segments using first-party data, attention signals and contextual intelligence rather than relying solely on geography, channel context or daypart.
“AI is starting to creep into the CTV space in a number of different areas,” said Harry Browne, vice president of TV, audio and display innovation at performance marketing agency Tinuiti. “Primarily, audience targeting … as well as contextual targeting to get the context that’s airing and whether that’s where an advertiser wants to place their ad.”
Among the 18% of marketers who said they are using AI in their CTV marketing campaigns, the majority (69%) said they use AI to analyze data. More than half (54%) said they use AI to create content and buy ad placements, respectively.
Amazon offers AI tools for marketers to both create content and buy media. Its Total TV tool provides AI-powered recommendations to help TV advertisers optimize their spending across Prime Video and other premium streaming publishers. Its AI Creative Studio and Audio Generator tools allow advertisers to produce video, image and audio creative which they can deploy across Amazon’s ad inventory, including Prime Video.
Roku partners with AI companies on creative production, particularly within its Ads Manager platform, which is primarily used by smaller DTC or local brands, according to Sarah Harms, Roku’s vice president of ad marketing and measurement.
“Before, entry into TV was prohibitive because brands needed either to be in the upfront or to have a fully produced TV creative. So, that’s helped democratize access to advertising on CTV,” Harms said. “However, there’s a lot of cheap AI content out there, and we haven’t really seen that infiltrate CTV like it has in the social platforms… That’s not to say AI content or ads can’t be premium. We just have a lot more control over it for now.”
Cory Treffiletti, chief marketing officer of AI-driven ad tech firm Rembrand, said the ease of integrating AI into CTV advertising depends on where in the tech stack it is being applied. “For instance, with interruptive ad formats, the barriers are structural and include fragmented identity resolution and siloed measurement,” Treffiletti said in an email.
Nevertheless, real-world applications of AI for CTV campaigns continue to grow. In April 2026, a group of AI researchers, including several Netflix employees, debuted an AI tool called VOID that can be used to remove objects from video clips, detect and understand the relationships between objects in a scene and alter the video altogether.
The team behind VOID wrote in a research paper about the tool: “VOID does not just recall simple visual cues from its training data, but applies high-level reasoning and world knowledge from the VLM [vision-language model] and underlying video diffusion model to video editing. As such, it stands to benefit as more capable generative models become available.”
Tinuiti’s Browne said it will take time before AI is widely applied in CTV campaigns. “CTV is the kind of creative that advertisers are most precious about. They have the most pride in what they put on the main screen in the home,” he said. “There is hesitancy to turn that over to an AI creative technology, where if something looks slightly off, it could make the whole creative crumble.”
