The Rise of AI Influencers: Transforming Ecommerce Marketing

A few weeks ago I got sucked into a rabbit hole on Instagram. I was watching a young woman in Los Angeles unbox a Prada bag, talk about her music, crack a joke about traffic on the 101. Two and a half million people follow her. Her name is Lil Miquela.

She's not real.

And once I figured that out, I couldn't stop thinking about one question.

If a fake person can hold two million people's attention better than half the real creators I know, what exactly are we paying human influencers for?

Let's talk about it.

What is an AI influencer, really?

The phrase gets thrown around loosely, so let's nail it down.

An AI influencer is a computer-generated character with its own name, face, personality, backstory, and social feed. Brands hire them — the way they'd hire a person — to promote products, model clothes, host launches, answer comments.

Think of them like a mascot that learned to talk back.

The difference between a mascot and an AI influencer is the relationship. The old Michelin Man stood on a billboard. He didn't reply to your DM at 2 a.m. with a joke. Lil Miquela does. Lu do Magalu does. That back-and-forth is the whole point — it's what turns a campaign asset into something that feels, to the follower, like a friend.

Magazine Luiza, the Brazilian retail giant, launched Lu back in 2007. She was early. Almost two decades later she has over 7.8 million Instagram followers, does product demos, style tips, customer interviews, and quietly drives a meaningful slice of sales for one of Latin America's biggest retailers. Not bad for someone who doesn't exist.

The market is bigger than you think

Here's a number that surprised me.

Influencer marketing, all-in, hit $23.6 billion in 2025. The forecast is 17% annual growth, which puts the industry somewhere near $71 billion by 2032. That's not a niche line item anymore — it's a real channel, sitting alongside paid search and TV.

Now here's the more interesting number.

Virtual influencers are posting engagement rates about 1.48% higher than their human counterparts. And 74% of shoppers say they've bought something on an influencer's recommendation, regardless of whether that influencer is made of flesh or pixels. The audience, by and large, doesn't seem to care.

I had to sit with that for a second. Seventy-four percent. They don't care.

What that tells you is that the job of an influencer — trust, taste, attention — can be performed well enough by a constructed persona that the audience keeps buying. The signal matters more than the substrate.

Who's already winning at this

Let me give you a few names to put faces to the trend.

Lil Miquela. 21-year-old robot in LA, 2.4 million followers, worked with Prada and Calvin Klein. She posts music, social commentary, the occasional product placement. Her persona is so carefully built that followers genuinely relate to her — the way they'd relate to a character in a long-running show.

Imma. Based in Japan, big in fashion. Coach, Fendi, the luxury circuit. She even delivered a virtual TED Talk. What's striking about Imma is the cross-border reach — a digitally constructed Japanese persona pulling attention from audiences in Europe and North America.

Shudu. Virtual model, north of 237,000 followers, shot for Vogue, worked with Fenty Beauty. She's part of a wave of digital talent pushing the fashion industry to rethink what "model" even means.

Lu do Magalu. Already mentioned. The granddaddy of the category, and still one of the most commercially successful.

Different shapes, different audiences, same underlying pattern. Each is a piece of brand infrastructure that performs like a person but is owned like an ad unit. That's the unlock.

How brands actually use them

Let's get concrete. If you're running ecommerce, what do you do with one of these characters?

Product launches. A virtual influencer can be programmed to run a countdown, post the unboxing the second the embargo lifts, do a behind-the-scenes carousel an hour later, and be in your email campaign by dinner. Coordinated, multi-channel, no scheduling friction. Bershka, the fashion retailer, has been running AI-influencer content on TikTok and pulling strong engagement on drops.

Cross-channel repurposing. One asset, many homes. Introduce the product on short-form video, go deeper in an Instagram carousel, drop into email. The influencer is the same face across all of them, which gives the campaign continuity that human teams — with their busy calendars and competing sponsors — struggle to match.

Always-on brand ambassador. Real influencers sleep. They get sick, they get cancelled, they post the wrong thing at the wrong time, they go on vacation the week your launch drops. An AI influencer doesn't. It is, in the most literal sense, on-brand 24/7, in every timezone, in every language you care to localize into.

That last point matters more than it sounds. If you're a brand trying to hold a consistent presence across, say, Brazil, Japan, and Germany — three languages, three cultural registers, three content calendars — an AI persona that can switch voice without jet lag is a serious operational advantage.

But here's the catch

Yeah, you knew there'd be a catch.

The first one is authenticity. A virtual influencer has never used the moisturizer she's recommending. She's never worn the jeans in real weather. She doesn't have a body, so her fitness advice is, in a strict sense, theoretical. Some audiences are fine with that. Some aren't, and the line isn't always where you'd predict.

The second is transparency. As audiences get sharper, "is this real?" becomes a question brands need to answer before it's asked. The honest disclosure — "this is a virtual character, here's who made her, here's what she's paid to say" — is starting to look less like a courtesy and more like a baseline. Skip it, and the trust you bought with the campaign evaporates the moment someone figures it out.

The third is regulation. Data privacy, intellectual property, advertising standards — the frameworks are still catching up to the technology. Different markets are moving at different speeds, and what's fine on a Tokyo feed in 2026 may not be fine on a Berlin one by mid-2027. Anyone running these programs at scale needs to be watching the legal map, not just the engagement dashboard.

Where this goes next

Two things are going to compound.

First, the tech. AR and VR are getting good enough that the line between "watching a virtual influencer on a feed" and "standing next to one in a simulated store" is going to blur. Imagine trying on a jacket in your living room while an AI character walks you through the fit, the fabric, the sustainability story, in your own language, at whatever hour you happen to be shopping. That's not sci-fi anymore — it's a near-term product surface.

Second, expectations. As audiences get more comfortable interacting with AI personas, they'll expect the same responsiveness and personalization from everyone — including the human creators who now have to compete with software that doesn't sleep, doesn't charge a day rate, and doesn't negotiate usage rights.

The real shift isn't that fake people are getting better at marketing. It's that audiences are getting comfortable being marketed to by something they know isn't real.

That's the line to watch.

So what do you do with this?

If you run a brand, three things, in this order.

One. Stop thinking of AI influencers as a gimmick. The engagement data is real, the economics are real, and the channel is already past the early-adopter phase. Magazine Luiza has been doing this for nearly twenty years.

Two. If you experiment, start with a use case where the weaknesses don't bite — a product launch, a short campaign, a market where you need always-on presence but can't afford a human roster. Measure the engagement, measure the conversion, and decide with numbers, not vibes.

Three. Get your disclosure house in order on day one. The brands that win the next five years of this won't be the ones who hid the fact that their influencer wasn't human. They'll be the ones who told the truth and made the audience care anyway.

Lu do Magalu is still posting. Lil Miquela is still posting. Imma is still posting. None of them know what year it is. All of them are selling.

That's the moment we're in. The only real question is whether you want to be early, or whether you want to be the brand explaining to its board in 2028 why a fictional character just ate your category.

Your call.