Creators turn to agentic AI to manage fan engagement
By Alexander Lee • June 20, 2025 •
Creators are increasingly turning to agentic AI to streamline communication with fans — saving time and money — but raising new questions for brands and influencer marketers.
The term “agentic AI” refers to artificial intelligence tools that can autonomously pursue goals, take actions and make decisions without requiring constant human input. Unlike prompt-based AI tools like ChatGPT, which rely on direct, step-by-step input from users, agentic AI systems can pursue goals autonomously across multiple steps — often mimicking the behaviors or decision-making patterns of specific individuals.
Agentic AI is one of the tech industry’s buzzwords du jour, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman writing in January that he anticipated AI agents would join the workforce and “materially change the output of companies” in 2025. Now, content creators are getting in on the action by using AI agents to engage with their fans.
The key numbers
- Agentic AI is gaining ground across a range of industries and enterprise uses: 33 percent of business software applications will incorporate AI agents by 2028, per an October 2024 Gartner report — up from 1 percent in 2024.
- Around two-thirds of all businesses are exploring agentic AI, according to research by Boston Consulting Group last year.
- Consumer confidence in agentic AI is mixed. A January 2025 study by Qualtrics found that consumer comfort with using AI to complete commonplace activities had decreased by 10.5 percent year-over-year, with only 26 percent of consumers saying they trusted organizations to use AI responsibly.
The most visible way that creators are using agentic AI is to respond to comments and direct messages from fans on social media. In some ways, this use case is a no-brainer: creators are flooded with messages daily and rarely have time to respond. Agentic AI can be used to actively monitor incoming engagement (DMs, comments) and decide when and how to respond with personalized replies — offering fans a sense of connection they might not otherwise get.
Creators Elizabeth Gasiba, Paige Piskin and Marcella Cortland told Digiday they are experimenting with using AI agents in this way, uploading their own writing and comments to tools such as Soopra to help those agents speak in their voices. Piskin said she toggles her AI assistant on and off depending on traffic and how much help she needs engaging — and that her AI agent is clearly labeled as such to anyone who interacts with it.
“Without these tools, I really was at a bottleneck a few years ago and struggled to keep up with content creation while also producing client work — I would go months without posting anything on my personal pages,” she said. “Now I have so many tools and creative pipelines, I can produce more content for my platform as well as for clients without getting burned out.”
Trained to mimic a creator’s tone and personality
Creators’ AI agents are more complicated creatures than the chatbots that have become commonplace across the web in the past year. Instead of simply providing accurate, grammatically correct responses, the AI agents used by creators need to be trained to accurately mimic a creator’s tone and personality.
“I do that by making a daily journal — these are my thoughts today, and that educates my persona,” said Cortland, a writer and film producer. “I also host film festivals and do occasional interviews with people, and I like adding content that I’ve done before, so my digital twin understands who I am.”
Although most creators who are using agentic AI to interact with their fans are up front about this fact, Gasiba said that she believed her AI agents had “humanized” her online presence by giving her followers more of a chance to engage with her personality, regardless of whether they did so through AI. Before using Soopra to build an AI persona, she had regularly gone through her comments to type out personal responses.
“Even though they know it’s not me typing in real time, the responses still feel like me,” she said. “I’ve had people say things like, ‘Wait, this sounds just like you!’ — which is exactly the goal. The vibe, the tone, the little expressions — it all matches how I talk.”
Advertisers concerned AI can ‘misrepresent’ influencers
Creators’ embrace of agentic AI could put some advertisers on the back foot. As generative AI technology goes mainstream, brands are increasingly adding contract clauses that require influencer content to be made by human creators — not AI. While social media interactions are not often specified within contract language, advertisers have traditionally considered them as part of a creator’s value. That means creators who use AI agents to manage engagement could risk making themselves less appealing to sponsors.
“I’ve been surprised by how many advertisers and clients, when they are chasing for efficiencies — and AI is the easiest lever for that — are writing in, ‘we do not want AI in use through the creative process,’ and that applies to influencers as well,” said Dentsu Creative UK CEO Jessica Tamsedge. “And that’s an issue of brand suitability in certain environments, inasmuch as how AI can augment, and slightly misrepresent, influencers in this space.”
By allowing AI agents to interact with their fans, creators are inherently giving up some measure of control over the conversation, no matter how well the chatbot might be trained. If a commenter leads a chatbot down the wrong path, it could create ethical or legal complications for both creators and the brands that sponsor them.
“In an era where kids are particularly susceptible to social media influence, if they keep interacting with the comments, and that digital robot keeps responding, there would be a fall-off point where the answers would begin to stray, even with agentic AI,” said Allison Harbin, an AI analyst and ethicist. “After a few turns of conversation, the robot’s answers get further and further away from the original topic — and that’s where you see the risk come in.”
Gasiba, Piskin and Cortland told Digiday that they are not using AI agents to engage with fans under branded content — just normal posts. Brand suitability issues notwithstanding, Piskin and Gasiba said that their fans were enjoying their interactions with their digital twins, both in short exchanges and longer conversations. Gasiba said that having longer interactions with fans would help increase her engagement numbers and make her social presence more appealing to potential sponsors.
“That kind of engagement absolutely catches the attention of brands,” she said. “They love to see active, two-way conversations and genuine interaction. So it’s not just about the numbers — it’s about the quality of the relationship I have with my audience. That authenticity makes everything else flow — brand deals included.”
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