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UGC continues to be the winning format in 2025 with all our clients stating that their best performing creatives are, you guessed it - UGC which we deliver throAccording to McKinsey, 65% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function, with marketing and sales leading the charge across departments. Due to the digital nature of D2C brands, the impact of AI can be significantly higher compared to other industries.
From marketers using AI for creative & copy writing, chatbots in customer support software, to inventory forecasting & data analysis, AI will change the way D2C brands operate. As the technology unlocks efficiencies across the P&L brands, which effectively implement AI, will be able to increase operating margins, which can be used to re-invest in growth.
How to effectively leverage AI in the different business units of your D2C brand, but at the same time avoid losing the personal touch with consumers will be covered in this article.
Let’s start with the business unit, which we are all most interested in: marketing. With creative volume being one of the key challenges media buyers and D2C brands face, using AI is tempting to reduce cost and increase creative velocity.
With 76% of marketers already using AI to write copy and 60% leveraging it for instant image creation, AI is changing the way marketing works and brands not leveraging these trends are losing out.
A recent survey from Motion indicated that out of 500+ D2C advertisers, 85.7% indicated that they will be increasing the use of AI for research and creative ideation and that 78.6% will be increasing the use of AI for creative production (Motion Creative Trends Report, 2025).
The impact on creative, however, can be distinguished into two key parts:
The biggest impact of AI will be on branded product-based assets as AI will be able to create high-quality product visuals which will make it easier for brands to test creatives at a larger scale.
The increase in AI content, however, will have an adverse effect on consumers, which will continue to have the desire for human connections, for which most brands are already using UGC.
Out of 15 clients we spoke to, which had a combined $7.5M in monthly Ad spend on Meta, the average % spend on UGC was around 65% indicating that the need for human-led creatives is still taking the lead.
Although we are seeing more AI avatars gaining traction on social media, we still think that most consumers will crave the connection to real humans, which is difficult to replicate with AI. Due to this, we think that UGC and authenticity will continue to increase in importance over the years as the quantity of AI content increases in advertising.
We see the biggest impact of AI in influencer marketing due to the larger amount of manual work involved in managing an effective influencer program and the need for personalization when automation is being used.
Ai is also being used for match making to make it easier for brands to find the right influencers. Automatically enabling the selection of the right influencers based on your social media profile and brand description is sth we already built into the Influencer Hero platform.
The use of Ai can be used to better detect fake followers and other suspicious activity to improve decision making when selecting influencers.
At Influencer Hero for example we use Ai to include a personalized sentence in every outreach message leading to industry leading reply rates when reaching out to influencers. The ai looks at the last posts on social media to formulate a personalized sentence as shown in the example below.
You are also able to automatically create outreach sequences using AI. You simply input your brand name and a short description of your brand and our AI will automatically create and an outreach email including follow ups.
As we have included everything we learned to maximize reply rates into the prompt, the AI-generated email sequence includes all the elements needed to maximize reply rates.
Automating manual tasks and enabling effective communication is what a good CRM should offer. This is an area where our team at Influencer Hero has been working on for quite some time, allowing to batch actions using AI. This powerful feature will be released by the end of this month and will allow influencer managers to initiate certain actions based on prompts.
Here are some examples:
These batching capabilities will allow one influencer manager to manage a large number of influencers, reducing management cost and hence increasing ROI.
These are just a few examples of the features we are working on, and we see the use of AI within our influencer CRM and in influencer marketing in general becoming more dominant as the capabilities of the models continue to improve.
Similar to paid social AI content could be increasingly used for static visuals, but as often the case, what works well on organic should be used on paid and vice versa. Hence incorporating UGC of real people & founder-led content will be crucial and become even more important as AI content increases on social media.
At the end of the day only real people can tell real stories. Trust is one of the most important elements in advertising, especially when it comes to product experiences. E.g. having someone share their personal experience of the health benefits after taking certain supplements will always have a bigger impact than an AI-generated piece of content.
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Due to the usage of AI the importance of UGC will only continue to increase. And one of the biggest challenges media buyers and advertisers face is creative volume. With competitors testing more and more creatives, it becomes even more difficult to quickly find winning ads.
To tackle this, we recommend having an always on product seeding campaign through which your brand can generate 40-50 new creative assets every month, which are automatically collected in our UGC library.
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SEO and copywriting is probably the marketing segments with the biggest AI impact. From quickly scaling product page copy writing to leveraging AI for content marketing and SEO articles, brands using AI effectively will have a big head start to brands writing all content manually.
Now, as always when using AI there is a nuance to this as you can’t simply write full articles in a single prompt. As Google Search’s guidance about AI generated content states:
“Rewarding high quality content, however it is produced”
“Google's ranking systems aim to reward original, high-quality content that demonstrates qualities of what we call E-E-A-T: expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.”
It is important here to note that they mention “however it is produced” hence indicating that it is allowed to use AI.
What you should just keep in mind as a brand is that AI takes all existing content on the web to create content, hence you won’t be able to create original content based on AI alone.
Combine AI content for parts which are more manual in nature, and fill the article with your own experience and expertise to make sure that Google will rank your articles. We did this for our own Influencer Hero domain going from 0 to 100K organic search traffic in less than 12 months.
Business units that include manual work are typically the areas where AI will have the biggest impact.
All major customer support platforms, for example, include AI to increase support efficiency. Due to the repetitive nature of support in e-commerce orders, it is estimated that around 60% of customer inquiries can be automated using AI (Gorgias, 2025).
If you are the founder, CMO or any other role working in D2C, your personal efficiency will have the biggest impact on the business you are working for. You are probably already doing this, but we can only recommend to use AI on a daily basis and train your entire team to do the same.
From research to solving problems, it is astonishing how AI can provide you with the right answers and utilizing all of this in your D2C business will set you up for success.
AI is transforming the way D2C brands operate, unlocking efficiencies across marketing, customer support, influencer partnerships, and team productivity. While AI-driven automation enhances creative production, analytics, and decision-making, maintaining authenticity and human connection remains critical. The rise of AI-generated content makes UGC and real storytelling more valuable than ever in building trust with consumers. Brands that effectively integrate AI while preserving authenticity will gain a competitive edge—leveraging efficiency without sacrificing the personal touch that drives consumer engagement and loyalty.
AI enables D2C brands to analyze vast amounts of customer data, facilitating hyper-personalized marketing campaigns. By understanding individual preferences and behaviors, brands can deliver tailored content and product recommendations, enhancing customer engagement and conversion rates.
AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants provide instant responses to customer inquiries, handle common issues, and offer 24/7 support. This automation improves customer satisfaction and reduces operational costs associated with human support teams.
AI algorithms can predict product demand by analyzing historical sales data and market trends, allowing D2C brands to optimize inventory levels, reduce stockouts, and minimize overstock situations, leading to more efficient operations.
AI aids in analyzing customer feedback and market trends, enabling D2C brands to identify consumer needs and preferences. This insight informs the development of new products that align with customer expectations, increasing the likelihood of market success.
Yes, challenges include ensuring data quality, addressing potential biases in AI algorithms, maintaining a balance between automation and human touch, and managing the costs associated with implementing and maintaining AI technologies.
Schedule a Demo with one of our media experts below.
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