Why AI companies became the biggest spenders on creators

AI and software companies are now the biggest single category spending on creators. Ramp's card and bill-pay data puts them at 28.2% of all US creator spend between August 2025 and July 2026, second only to consumer brands as a whole and ahead of every individual consumer category. In Kyra's data, paid creator posts from AI tools grew 11.4 times in a year. The reason is simple: people trust creators far more than they trust AI companies, and creators are the quickest way to borrow that trust.

A bot posts into our Slack every week with the hundred biggest creator ads of the last seven days and the brands that commissioned them. We run creator campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the world, so we track every paid creator post across TikTok and Instagram. That list is the byproduct.

For a decade it looked the same. Beauty. Fashion. Food and drink. Consumer brands spending enormous amounts with creators to buy share of voice.

Then the list changed. OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Grok: AI and software companies, week after week, started to dominate it. Products that are mostly bought by businesses were suddenly running some of the biggest creator partnerships in the market.

It isn't that everything is growing. We counted 1,482 paid creator posts from AI tools in the last three months, against 116 in the first three months of the year we measured. Those counts cover the main AI assistants. Add Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, ElevenLabs, Gamma and Wispr Flow and the trend gets stronger.

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  AI tools: up 11.4 times
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  Travel: up 4.5 times
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  Fintech: up 3.7 times
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  Beauty: up 2.3 times

Ramp's economics team sees the same thing in its data on tens of thousands of US businesses. Business spend on influencer marketing is up 3.75 times since 2023. Beauty, the biggest spender in this market by a distance for years, is now being outspent three to one by AI and software.

Then, in September, Google signed a multi-year deal with MrBeast covering Gemini and Fitbit. One of the biggest creators in the world, showing hundreds of millions of people what an AI product can do. It's a strong signal to the rest of the market about how to structure big reach deals.

AI companies have a likability problem. People like the products more than they like the companies that built them. They're anxious about data centres, jobs, the concentration of power and handing more of their lives to systems they can't see.

People don't want to hear about the technology from the companies themselves. They do trust creators. They watch them every day and they know their kids' names. Those relationships take years to build, and they're the most reliable transfer of trust available to brands right now.

Some of these companies are less than five years old. They have no marketing legacy holding them back, so they can put their money into whatever shifts perception quickest. They're choosing creators.

Given the mood about AI, you might expect the ads to underperform. Nick Dart, Kyra's co-founder, who runs the data warehouse these numbers come from, looked at every TikTok and Instagram post that named an AI product this summer, paid and unpaid.

They don't underperform. An AI ad gets the same share of a creator's normal views as a beauty ad does. There's no penalty for being an AI company.

The unpaid side is more striking. For every post OpenAI paid for, twenty more mentioned ChatGPT for free. Beauty runs at five to one. AI companies are buying into a conversation that already exists and using paid posts to multiply it.

But three quarters of the creators did exactly one AI ad. There are no rosters yet. Most AI companies are still running one-off posts, not programmes.

AI companies will keep spending on creators, and they should. But when people are wary of you, you're held to a higher standard. A partnership that looks careless becomes the story. Trust can be bought, but the money works much harder if you build it properly:

1. Build a creator programme. An always-on community of paid partners you can call on across the year, not a string of one-off posts.
2. Start with fans. Use data to find creators who already use your product. The evidence may be buried in their video transcripts.
3. Brief them properly. Not prescriptively, but make sure they understand what they're promoting.
4. Track the top performers. Against sign-ups and paid users, not just views. Then put more behind them.
5. Onboard them for the long term. Bring them into the community, keep them up to date and invite them to things.
6. Keep building. Push the numbers up every month.

The audience then gets to watch a creator go from trying a product to relying on it. That's the trust AI companies are paying for. Don't rush it.