Only 25% of marketers say they use AI for their influencer marketing work, according to a Digiday+ Research survey of more than 100 marketing professionals conducted in the first quarter of 2026. That's well behind AI adoption in social media (49%) and retail media (42%), making influencer work one of the channels marketers are slowest to hand over to AI.
Skincare brand Beekman 1802 is part of that 25%, but not in the way most people picture AI showing up in creator campaigns. The brand partnered with AI analytics firm Bezel to run its first-party CRM and Shopify data through large language models. "We were able to throw all of our data at a large language model and really understand deeply who this consumer is and how many subtypes of consumer we have," said chief digital officer David Baker.
The core takeaway: the brands ahead on AI in influencer marketing aren't using it to generate the content customers see. They're using it to sharpen who they brief and how, while keeping a real person in front of the camera, and that distinction is doing more good than harm.
How are marketers actually using AI in influencer campaigns?
Among the 25% of marketers already using AI for influencer work, the Digiday+ Research survey found the majority, 75%, use it to analyze data. More than half use it for content creation (63%) and campaign outreach (56%). In other words, even within the group that has adopted AI, the tool is doing research and logistics work far more often than it's doing anything customer-facing.
That pattern shows up clearly at Later, the creator marketing platform, which built an AI system that matches campaign briefs to influencers and forecasts content performance using historic engagement data. Later CEO Scott Sutton told Digiday in March that the richer data picture "gives me confidence that I'm going to get a high ROAS on my campaign." The AI is choosing who to work with and predicting how a campaign will perform. The creator still shoots the content.
Why are marketers choosing data over creative when it comes to AI?
Beekman 1802's approach illustrates the pattern well. By feeding CRM and Shopify data into large language models, the team uncovered specific customer personas that now guide campaign strategy and product messaging, without an AI-generated face ever appearing in a post. The AI's job stops at insight. The creative direction, and the creator, stay human.
Later's Sutton framed the shift as a response to how creator marketing itself has changed: brands are working with more creators, generally smaller to mid-sized ones, in more targeted ways, and that volume makes manual campaign matching impractical. AI becomes infrastructure for scale, not a replacement for the creator relationship.
Why is trust the real barrier, not technology?
The hesitation around AI-generated influencer content isn't a capability problem. It's a trust problem, and brands seem to know it. According to an April 2025 study by the World Federation of Advertisers, 96% of brands with no plans to work with virtual influencers cite consumer trust as the reason.
Creators themselves have already adopted AI widely, just not as the thing customers see. A Wondercraft report on content creation found that over 80% of creators use AI somewhere in their workflow, with roughly 40% relying on it from ideation through delivery. The tools are present at nearly every stage of production. What's largely absent is AI standing in for the creator on camera.
What this means for brands working with creators
Put together, the data points in one direction: the smartest use of AI in influencer marketing right now is behind the scenes. Use it to understand audience subtypes the way Beekman 1802 does. Use it to match briefs to the right creators and forecast performance the way Later does. Don't use it to replace the person your audience is actually watching.
The 25% adoption number isn't a sign that influencer marketing is behind on AI. It's a sign that the marketers already using it have been deliberate about where it belongs, and that discipline is likely to separate the campaigns that build trust from the ones that quietly erode it.
One Media Society is a Miami-based digital marketing agency that helps hospitality, wellness, and lifestyle brands build creator partnerships people actually trust, and stories like this one are a good reminder that the smartest AI use in this industry is the kind your audience never has to think about.