In any given week, you're likely:

• Finding and vetting new creator profiles
• Crafting personalized outreach messages
• Negotiating with influencers you’ve shortlisted
• Managing ongoing campaign communications
• Coordinating with legal and marketing on contracts and assets

…And it's still only Wednesday.

Influencer marketers are strapped wire-thin for time. There’s just so much to do – it’s nearly impossible to survive (with your sanity) without automation and the help of AI tools.

But the conundrum in this industry is that working with creators is inherently a very relationship-driven role. You have to be careful not to automate the human aspect of influencer marketing to a robot.

To understand where to draw the line, we asked over 50 influencer marketers how they use AI in their workflows and where they avoid it. 

The TL;DR version

To no one's surprise, marketers have significantly increased their use of AI to assist with their day-to-day tasks. When we ran our big bad yearly survey last year, a little more than half of the marketers we polled were using AI. In 2025, that number jumped to 81.9%.

But what are influencer marketers using AI for? And more importantly, what are they avoiding AI for? Here’s a quick summary:

Let's look at each task and see where AI earns its keep (and where it doesn't).

Use AI for: Influencer search

According to our survey, influencer discovery is the #1 thing marketers wish they could use AI for.

It’s understandable: searching for the right influencers can be time-consuming and exhausting. If you use an influencer marketing software, you can apply filters like follower count, engagement rate, etc., and find creators who match your criteria more quickly than the manual hashtag-search method. But even that’s not always enough because:

• You still have to vet through a big database/list of creators because not every requirement can fit into a filter
• Using the same filters over and over again means you’re unable to find unique, out of the box creators (aka storyfit influencers) who’d be perfect for your brand
  

Enter: Modash’s AI search feature. Just type what you’re looking for and the tool will start finding influencers who create that kind of content. Modash will look inside the visual content to find what you’re looking for, just like a human would.

Let’s say you’re an influencer marketer for a healthy snack brand. You want to find busy moms who don’t always have the time to whip up something nutritious for their kids.

The old way: you’d manually search for mom influencers, vet creators who actually talk about the struggle of making multiple meals for children every day, and check if they’re a brand fit. You’ll maybe shortlist a few creators after hours of searching.

The new way: you open Modash and enter “moms talking about healthy snacks” in the AI search bar. You instantly get a list of mom influencers who already post about your ideal content (talk about a natural fit). You can layer filters like location, follower count, engagement rate, gender, age, language, and more to ensure the search displays only creators who match your criteria to a T.

‍Try Modash’s AI search for free for 14 days.

Use AI for: Managing influencer content and lists

As you scale your influencer marketing efforts, it gets more and more time-consuming to:

• Gather all the content an influencer posts about your brand
• Categorizing influencers based on various campaigns you’re running
  

44.7% of marketers in our survey automate these tasks using AI tools. In Modash, for example, you can collect all influencer content that mentions a particular hashtag, brand, or keyword (including Instagram Stories!). You can even collect all the content an influencer posts and then pick the ones you want to track for your campaigns.

Modash will also flag when an influencer has missed the proper FTC guidelines for ad disclosure. Life-saver feature, in my opinion.

Coming to influencer management, you can use tools to be much more efficient in organizing your creator lists. You want to keep a note of:

• Influencers you’ve reached out to
• Influencers you need to follow up with
• Influencers you need to send products to
• Influencers whose content you need to approve
• …and lots of other relationship stages
  

Instead of manually updating spreadsheets, you can use software to manage it all in one place. In Modash, you select and customize the stage of an influencer relationship so everyone’s on the same page.

To make it even more efficient, connect your Shopify store to view the unique links and discount codes associated with each influencer in the same tab.

Use AI for: Tracking influencer and campaign performance

Another huge time-suck task for marketers is reporting on influencer marketing performance. AI can’t take the lead in automating the entire report. After all, only you know how creator marketing fits into your larger business goals. But AI can help speed up the process by quickly providing accurate performance numbers for your campaigns and creators.

In Modash, you can see a campaign’s overview in a jiffy: views, EMV, sales, clicks, cost, it’s all there.

You can also see more in-depth metrics for each campaign, like individual influencer performance. To get more accurate data, you can even customize the EMV formula.

Marketers also frequently report a desire to analyze qualitative aspects of influencer/campaign performance. For example, you might want to analyze the comments on an influencer’s post to understand customer sentiment about your brand. To do that, you can use a tool like Siftsy. It’s not perfect, but it can help you get a lot of insights much more quickly than the manual way.

Another helpful use case for AI is code leak detection. Tools like Marcode can help you spot if an influencer’s discount coupon has been leaked to third-party sites. This can help you avoid fraud and ensure you’re attributing accurate sales to your creator partners.

Use AI for: Refining influencer briefs, scripts, and captions

8 out of 10 marketers use AI to create influencer briefs and related written materials (such as captions, scripts, etc.). It’s the #1 use case for marketers in our survey.

Artificial intelligence can be really helpful for reducing the administrative friction here because you can create a brief template to reuse for every creator. You can ask any AI tool to:

• Create a brief after feeding it your product details, company mission, key messages, deliverables, and brand tone
• Summarize your campaign strategy so you can share a concise version with your influencer partners
• Translate briefs for global campaigns
  

It goes without saying, but double check every brief AI produces to ensure it’s accurate for your brand. Once refined, though, AI tools can help you create briefs faster and make them more consistent for creators across the board.

You can also use AI to brainstorm talking points, script ideas, and social media captions for your campaigns. AI can make for a great thought partner, especially when you’re in a creative rut and need a starting point to get the juices flowing.

Use AI for: Influencer outreach and other communication templates

Influencer outreach is the second most common use case for AI, according to our survey. If you’re reaching out to many creators every day, AI can help refine parts about your company and campaign (which remain the same in each message). 

You can also use AI to find information about an influencer so you can learn more about them and personalize your initial message. For example, I asked ChatGPT to search more about Haley Pham using this prompt:

“Act as an influencer marketer reaching out to the book influencer, Haley Pham. Share details about their life and content that can help me personalize my first outreach message to this creator. Dig through their Instagram profile, YouTube channel, and any other podcasts they've been on.”

With this info, I can congratulate the creator on their first book to personalize the outreach message.

‍⚠️ Remember: always verify if what an AI tool is presenting is accurate because it can hallucinate.

AI can also help create templates for messages you send regularly. For example, if you share performance numbers with your affiliates every week or month, you can use AI to create a template and then just update the data whenever you send the performance report to your creator partners.

Similarly, you can also use AI to write a simple follow-up message to creators you’ve been meaning to follow-up with. You can add Modash into the mix to automate follow-ups entirely. Customize at what date and time you want to send your follow-up email and Modash will handle it for you, no reminders needed.

And yes, you can track your entire outreach sequence for each creator in a single dashboard. You’ll know exactly when you first reached out, followed up, received a reply, and so on.

Lastly, you can also use AI to summarize an email thread and extract key details if an email chain has gotten unbearably long.

Use AI for: Writing the first draft of a contract

Influencer contracts can seem like red tape, but they’re non-negotiable to secure your brand and ensure you and your creator partners are on the same page.

You can use AI to get a legally structured starting point that you can refine with your legal team. Just input the information you’ll need to include:

• Influencer name
• Campaign goals
• Deliverables, deadlines, and compensation‍
• Compensation model (flat fee, affiliate, gifting)‍
• Usage rights duration (if applicable)‍
• Exclusivity terms and conditions (if applicable)

⚠️ Remember: AI is a good starting point for your contract. But you must get a contract reviewed by a lawyer before sending it to any creator.

Many AI tools will also have plug-and-play legal templates so you don’t have to start from scratch.

You can also use AI to summarize a contract and extract key terms. This can help your team and influencer partners get a quick overview of the terms and conditions.

The above sections make it clear: AI can be an excellent tool to make your workflows more efficient, no doubt about it. But influencer marketing can’t be successful without a human element. Anna Jędrzejewska elaborates:

AI won’t replace the human touch (good luck automating intuition), but it will give us back the hours we need to actually strategize instead of chasing file links and signatures. Influencer marketing is evolving from spreadsheets to systems.

Anna Jędrzejewska Senior Campaign Manager

Here are the tasks in your workflow you shouldn’t hand over to AI (and why).

Avoid AI for: Influencer vetting (qualitative)

You can use AI tools to shortlist creators that meet your quantitative criteria. But beyond the initial check, you need to vet influencers qualitatively to truly understand whether or not they’re the right fit for the brand. This includes checking things like:

• Do the creator’s partnerships feel authentic and blend in seamlessly in their content?
• Does this influencer create content that fits our brand’s guidelines?
• Does the influencer’s personality and values match your brand?
  

44% of the marketers we surveyed for another report said they spend 3-10 minutes evaluating each influencer they shortlist.

If you used only AI to evaluate influencers, you’d probably be done much more quickly. But at what cost? AI cannot understand your brand as thoroughly as you do. It doesn’t have taste and can’t distinguish top-notch content from a cringeworthy post. Paulina Cieślik explains why AI shouldn’t be the decision maker when it comes to influencer selection:

When it comes to influencer selection or data analysis, I don’t feel AI is accurate or insightful enough yet. In influencer marketing, the human touch – creativity, empathy, and understanding the context – is still irreplaceable. AI should support the process, not be seen as a final decision-maker.

Paulina Cieślik Junior Social Commerce Manager

Avoid AI for: Communicating with influencers

Have you ever seen those clearly AI-generated LinkedIn comments that give everyone the ick? Your influencers would feel similarly if you use AI to communicate with them. If you think creators can’t tell, just think of how you can sniff a janky AI-written comment a mile away.

When you’re communicating with influencers – whether that’s answering a simple question or negotiating contract terms – avoid AI as much as possible.

Giving a robotic reply back will make your creator partners feel like they’re just another name on your list. It’ll immediately strip away any authenticity and trust you’ve cultivated.

It’s simple, really: a human on one end expects a human on the other end to respond to them.

Avoid AI for: Providing creators feedback on their work

You can track influencer performance using AI tools, but don’t standardize feedback, especially for your long-term influencer partners.

Providing personalized feedback will not only make the creator feel like they’re part of the team but also help you in the long run. How? When you take the time to tailor the feedback to an influencer, you’re giving them an excellent chance to create better content for you in the future. In the big picture, this will limit the round of edits you require and reduce your workload.

If you use AI to analyze an influencer’s content, it won’t give you the complete picture. AI doesn’t understand what kind of posts stop the scroll and get people buying. It doesn’t know what your brand needs. Don’t trust AI over your own intuition and judgement.

Avoid AI for: Writing entirely AI-generated captions or scripts

Using AI to brainstorm post ideas, captions, and scripts is A-OK. But don’t use AI-generated content word-for-word with no edits or reviews. Leslie Belen explains why:

My strongest feeling is that AI must stay out of the creative process. Since our product is a natural snack bar, the content has to feel genuine and personal. AI-generated captions or scripts instantly kill the authenticity that our health and wellness audience demands. We are all for using AI for efficiency in the back-end, but the front-end creative must remain human and authentic.

Leslie Belen Influencer Search and Outreach Virtual Assistant

As someone who is a consumer and has been reading tons of clearly AI-generated captions online, I can tell you, AI-generated captions instantly turn me off. It kills brand trust and creates a negative association in the minds of future buyers.

AI can be your content partner to refine your customer-facing content, but don’t hand over the job entirely to the tool.

Avoid AI for: Sending mass influencer outreach messages

Mass influencer outreach works in very few scenarios in the influencer marketing world. For a majority of cases, you’ll want to avoid an AI-generated initial message to any creator. It starts off your relationship on the wrong foot and risks ruining your brand’s reputation. Lee Drysdale agrees:

When outreaching, I always like to take the time to personalise and mention something about an influencer’s content that I particularly like. I feel like using AI here can really strip away the relationship building side of influencer marketing. Anyone can speak to AI, but not everybody gets to speak to me.

Lee Drysdale Senior Influencer and Affiliates Executive

As Lee rightly says, anyone can be a robot. But no one can be you. 😉

You can use AI to refine the part about your brand, campaign, and CTA (because that’s common across all), but don’t use it to personalize the section about the influencer. Here’s an example of what you can templatize:

If you’re looking to understand how marketers practice influencer outreach in the real world, here are 14 examples from real brands.

Avoid AI for: Using AI-generated contracts without legal review

Sending over an AI-generated contract to an influencer is a disaster waiting to happen. A single mistake can cost you money, reputation, and a lot of headaches.

AI doesn’t know jurisdiction-specific laws or understand legal nuance. Plus, you need specific legal terminologies to make your contract valid. Yes, you can ask AI to use that particular legal language, but that doesn’t ensure it’ll follow your instructions. 

Even if you create an AI-generated contract, you need your legal team to sign off on it to ensure it’s up to the mark. Think about it this way: if you wouldn't blindly trust AI to write an email for you, why would you trust it with a legal document?

Let robots be robots, humans be humans

If I had to summarize the AI or not to AI debate, I’d say: use AI for admin tasks where you need no opinion, but avoid it for tasks that need the human touch.

Whenever you’re communicating with a human (whether that’s chatting with your influencer partners or writing captions for your audience), don’t rely solely on AI-generated outputs.

But whenever you find yourself doing tedious tasks over and over again (like updating spreadsheets or collecting influencer content), use AI to free up your time and energy.

AI can reshape how you work. It can save hours of admin time, surface insights faster, and help your team stay organized at scale. But it’s also a reminder that not every part of your job should be automated. The magic of influencer marketing still lies in relationships, creativity, and intuition – things no algorithm or tool can replicate.

If you want to use AI where it truly makes a difference – influencer discovery, content management, and performance tracking – try Modash. It’s built to make your workflows smarter without losing the human touch.