AI to grab a third of India's influencer budgets, but biggies to go bigger

He pointed to the brand’s intent to expand on such AI-led activities. “Our ambition goes beyond building a single character. The focus is on democratizing the use of AI across the organization—empowering teams to leverage intelligent tools for content creation, audience interaction, and insight mining. This opens up possibilities for multiple brand voices, hyper-personalized messaging, and always-on engagement ecosystems.”

And then there is the ice-cream maker Vadilal that has launched a mascot ‘Vaddy’ that runs as a mix of human and AI. Jewellery major CaratLane ran a campaign with AI influencer Kyra. While another AI influencer, Naina has worked with brands such as Oppo, Kotak and Sofy.

Abhishek Razdan, co-founder and chief executive officer of Avtr Meta Labs, the creator of Naina, said brands are increasingly treating AI influencers as a long-term strategy rather than a one-off attention grab. “Earlier, AI influencers were mostly seen as a PR experiment. Today, brands are at least open to discussing them as part of a longer-term content or communication strategy,” he said.

The learning so far has been that AI alone is not enough, says Razdan. “The personality still needs storytelling, consistency, cultural relevance and strong creative execution. The future will not be AI influencers replacing human influencers completely. It will be a more layered market,” he said. "AI influencers will take up parts of scalable and repeatable brand communication, while strong human creators will continue to command a premium for authenticity and trust.”

The shift is being driven by the collapsing costs of building AI models for brands. Nano and micro influencers—creators with under 100,000 followers—sold brands one thing: cheap reach. An AI character now does the same for even less, and the price keeps falling.

According to a report by influencer marketing agency Zefmo released last week, AI influencers will take 25-35% of nano- and micro-creator budgets in India by 2027.

As per the report, India's influencer marketing industry is estimated at over ₹10,000 crore, almost three times the industry estimates of 2024 valued at ₹3,375 crore.

The Zefmo report also said that a brand-ready AI influencer that cost up to ₹3.6 crore to build in 2022 can now be made for about ₹26 lakh. Once built, the brand owns the character outright—free to run it across campaigns, languages and platforms with no recurring talent fees.

That's not a threat to the top of the market—it's an extinction event for the commoditized middle. The report predicts premium at the top: elite human creator fees may rise 25-35% by 2027. “As AI floods the low end, genuine authenticity becomes a scarce asset. The handful of creators who own real trust and taste can charge more for it. Authenticity is becoming a luxury good," said Shudeep Majumdar, co-founder and chief executive officer at Zefmo. "The more synthetic content the market produces, the more a brand will pay for a human the audience actually believes."

The gap will only widen as AI creators multiply and undercut each other on price. "Not only are human creators charging more because their output is limited and that creates scarcity, but the rates of AI creators are also falling because the real cost lies in making that content feel authentic and relatable," said Arsh Goyal, a tech and AI creator with about half a million followers. He estimates that AI creator rates are falling 5-10% each month.

These developments are already changing how India's influencer industry works behind the scenes. Talent agencies are building AI creators of their own and preparing to pitch them to brands, just as they pitch human creators on their rosters.

“Agencies in the near future will operate two rosters: a human roster and an AI roster. On the AI side, your cost per view could be roughly one-third of your human roster because you’re paying for technology, not talent fees. The margins are structurally better,” said Neel Gogia, the cofounder and chief executive officer of influencer marketing firm IPLIX Media.

For now, the impact of these synthetic influencers is only encouraging. IPLIX tested an AI-generated trend video that crossed 3 million views. "The algorithm treated it no differently from human content," Gogia said.