Singapore-based marketing tech startup Affable.ai on Thursday announced the launch of Skye, an AI companion specifically designed for influencer marketing. Skye empowers marketers with AI capabilities to streamline and optimize their influencer marketing campaigns.
Affable.ai has partnered with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI PaLM API to bring technology to influencer marketing. The company said that Skye will streamline and add more intelligence to the world of influencer marketing.
Speaking to Storyboard18, Nisarg Shah, CEO and co-founder of Affable Technologies, said that their goal is to improve the end-to-end influencer management for marketers.
“It’s not just about finding the right influencers, but the entire journey of working with influencers has been very manual, cumbersome, and full of guesswork. We have tried to add as much intelligence and data as possible to remove opacity in the industry. With advancements in LLM (large language models), machine learning (ML), specifically with ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, it has been possible to streamline, automate, and add more intelligence to the world of influencer marketing,” he notes.
Shah explains that AI companion Skye has three distinct features that help marketers effectively implement their influencer-backed marketing campaigns.
The first one is the magic search feature that leverages the power of AI to deliver the most accurate influencers for any campaign, ensuring a perfect match. The search criteria also supports 100 languages.
The second feature is Skye’s lookalike recommendations, which list all the influencers that are similar to the chosen influencer based on chosen criteria. Skye also creates personalized influencer collaboration emails.
In a bid to ensure brand safety, the AI tool also has the ability to review content uploaded by influencers to help identify any potential fallout and maintain brand consistency. Additionally, it can keep a watchful eye on the comments section of influencer posts, immediately alerting you if a brand is at risk with any negative comments to address.
Sherie Ng, country director of Singapore at Google Cloud, notes that by integrating its proprietary database with semantic search capabilities and foundation models on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI to power Skye, Affable Technologies is turning tasks that used to take hours into quicker searches and conversational explorations.
“This reimagines end-to-end influencer marketing as we know it, transforming the novelty of generative AI into tangible value for its customers and business,” Sherie Ng adds.
This comes as a positive initiative in the burgeoning influencer marketing industry in India. The Indian influencer marketing industry, currently valued at about Rs 1,275 crore, representing a 42 percent increase (over Rs 900 crore) in 2021, is slated to grow at a CAGR of 25 percent for the next five years to become a Rs 2,800 crore industry by 2026, according to Influencer Marketing Report 2.0 of GroupM’s INCA.
Affable was founded by Nisarg Shah and Swayam Narain in 2017. In 2022, it raised $2 million from Prime Venture Partners, Decacorn Capital & SGInnovate. Affable’s AI-driven, self-service SaaS platform helps brands and agencies run high-impact influencer marketing campaigns. Affable brings transparency and analytics to influencer marketing and is being used by brands and agencies, including Sugar Cosmetics, Huawei, Wipro, Pomelo, Fresh, Omnicom, Dentsu, and We Communications.