AI companies are using influencers to market like consumer brands
Dear Colleagues: By reader request: trends in influencer marketing, and how it's being used by AI companies to grow market share with businesses.
Extras from Ramp Economics Lab:
- Are economists making themselves too useful in the AI boom? Last week, I spoke to FT’s Soumaya Keynes for her article on the increasing trend of AI startups hiring economists (FT).
- Cracks in the AI thesis: I went on Yahoo Finance to share my thoughts on emerging threats to the AI trade (LinkedIn).
I’m fascinated by the fact that AI companies, despite being primarily B2B software companies, behave a lot like consumer brands. This is surprising, given that 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic revenues are driven by businesses, not consumers, and likely more for other AI startups.
Of course, for a new and nascent technology, many of the buyers in charge of onboarding OpenAI and Anthropic for a firm probably heard about them first as consumers.
For this reason, the trajectory of OpenAI and Anthropic’s business adoption has largely followed their consumer brand recognition. We show it in the Ramp AI Index: OpenAI was the market leader from 2023 through the end of 2025. Given the success of ChatGPT’s initial launch, it was the consumer default. So if you thought of buying AI for your company, you probably started with ChatGPT.
In January 2026, we were first to report a shift: I tweeted that companies’ first AI check was going to Anthropic. This change coincided with two developments:
- Anthropic shifting focus from technical enterprise to non-technical consumer (they launched Claude Cowork and ran a Super Bowl ad).
- The Department of Defense labelled Anthropic a supply-chain risk. Many consumers heard about Anthropic for the first time and rallied behind it in support.
Both drove faster business adoption. It should be unsurprising then that other AI companies are using similar tactics. Consider one of the most significant trends in advertising over the last decade: influencer marketing.
Ramp data shows that business spend on influencer marketing has increased 3.75x since 2023, when it was around 0.4% of a company’s overall advertising / marketing budget. Today, it’s around 1.5% across all businesses, but for AI and software companies, it’s 2.4%, with most of the increase taking place over the last nine months.
In fact, the AI industry’s emphasis on influencer marketing puts it only second to all consumer brands in creator spend — consumer brands drive 43% of spend on creator / influencer marketing. AI and software companies drive 28.2%.
Both segments are also the largest drivers of ad spend overall, but both disproportionately spend it on influencers. Maybe we’ll see more companies try out OpenAI’s now infamous influencer summer camp idea?
