Brand, Trust, and the Rise of AI Influencers

The trust gap nobody's talking about

I keep coming back to this one thought: there is no AI today that knows everything. And honestly? Even when one does — it'll take decades before your average person trusts it the way they trust their accountant or their favorite YouTube channel.

And that's not a tech problem. That's a people problem.

Think about how trust actually works in your own life. You trust your doctor because she's been right about your health for ten years. You trust that one guy on YouTube who reviews cameras because every lens he recommended turned out great. You trust your friend's restaurant picks because they've never sent you somewhere bad.

None of that was built in a day. It took years of "this person was right, again and again." An AI hasn't had those years. It can't have had them — it just got here.

So as long as that gap exists, there's a job for people who can be trust brokers. Experts, authors, consultants, small agencies — anyone who says "I've already figured this out, let me walk you through it." When someone needs to pick health insurance, they don't open Claude and start prompting. They call the person they trust who already knows.

That's not going away anytime soon. Twenty years minimum. Probably more.

"Trust isn't a feature you ship. It's something you earn over years — and AI hasn't had those years yet."

We all live in a bubble

I need to say something uncomfortable here, and I'm including myself in this.

If you're reading Hacker News, using Perplexity and Claude daily, following the latest model drops, arguing about benchmarks on X — you live in a different universe from basically everyone else. And I mean everyone. Like, 99% of humans on Earth.

My mom has never heard of Claude. My neighbor doesn't know what a "model" is unless we're talking about fashion. My barber has no idea that AI can technically do his booking for free — he's perfectly happy with his paper notebook.

And you know what? The website that charges $6 to format a passport photo? Still making great money. Because the average person doesn't know — and doesn't care — that a free AI tool can do the same thing. They want to upload a photo, pay six bucks, and be done. That's it.

I catch myself making this mistake all the time. I'll look at some simple product and think "this is dead, AI already does this better." But that's my bubble talking. The real world runs on habits, not on what's technically possible. And habits change painfully slowly.

We in tech overestimate adoption speed by maybe 10x. We think in months. Normal people think in years. We think in features. Normal people think in "does this feel familiar and safe."

That's not me being condescending about normal people. That's me being honest about how badly our industry understands its own customers.

Being the bridge

Okay but here's where it gets exciting. That misunderstanding? It's a massive opportunity.

Instead of competing with big AI platforms, you become the bridge between them and the millions of people who have no idea these tools exist. You walk into the AI era alongside small businesses and regular people, and you help them figure it out.

What does that actually look like?

Maybe you're consulting a local restaurant on how to use AI for their social media. Maybe you're teaching real estate agents to write better listings with ChatGPT — not a theoretical course, just sitting with them and showing how it works. Maybe you're building a dead-simple interface on top of a powerful AI tool so that a dentist doesn't need to learn prompt engineering — she just clicks three buttons and gets what she needs.

Or maybe it's content. Explaining AI to normal humans in a way that makes them stop being scared. Not "here's what GPT-4o scores on MMLU benchmarks." More like "hey, this thing can save you three hours a week on the admin work you hate — here's exactly how."

The beautiful thing is — almost nobody is doing this right now. Most AI-savvy people are building for other AI-savvy people. Meanwhile, there are millions of small business owners who would pay real money for someone to just show them what's possible. In their language. For their problems. Without the jargon.

And the wider the gap grows between what AI can do and what regular people actually use? The more room there is for bridge builders like you.

AI influencers are coming — and they'll win

Now let me ruin your day a little bit.

First, let's be honest about something: social platforms don't pay creators. Not in any meaningful way. Meta doesn't. TikTok doesn't. There are monetization programs, sure, but compared to what the platform itself makes? It's pocket change.

Platforms are simple machines. Some people make content for free. Other people watch it. The platform sells ads in between. That's the entire business model. Creators are the unpaid labor force.

Now imagine what happens when AI influencers become indistinguishable from real people.

Picture a brand in a meeting room. Option A: pay a human influencer $15K for one video, work around their schedule, pray they don't post something embarrassing next week. Option B: spin up an AI character, produce a hundred personalized videos, run them 24/7, zero drama, zero fees after setup.

I know which one the CFO picks. And you do too.

This isn't a "maybe." It's a "when." Right now there's still a stigma — people feel weird about fake influencers, brands worry about backlash. But give it five to ten years. The generation growing up right now will see AI avatars the same way we see animated characters. Totally normal.

Here's the part that makes creators really uncomfortable though. The people complaining about AI disruption? They're the same people who disrupted someone else a decade ago.

Influencers took ad money from TV stars. Before YouTube and Instagram, all those budgets went to Hollywood actors and pop singers. If you weren't on television, you didn't exist. Then social media showed up, and a whole generation of creators replaced traditional celebrities.

Now AI is doing to influencers what influencers did to TV stars. Same cycle. When we're the ones disrupting, it feels exciting and fair. When disruption comes for us, suddenly it's unfair. But it's the exact same process — just from the other side of the table.

I don't say this to be mean. I say it because understanding the pattern is step one of adapting to it. Getting angry at AI influencers is about as useful as TV executives being angry at YouTubers in 2010.

The only real defense

So what do you actually do?

You move toward what AI can't touch. Not yet, anyway.

Show up in person. Build expertise that's backed by a real track record people can verify. Create a community around you as a real human being — not a content machine, a person. Host events. Shake hands. Have dinner with people. Let them see who you actually are when the camera isn't on.

An AI can crank out a thousand videos in your style. It can't walk into a room and make people feel something. It can't carry a decade of credibility that your audience watched you build in real time. It can't read the room at a client dinner and say the right thing at the right moment.

The more of your brand that lives in "stuff that can't be copied" territory, the longer you stay relevant. The more it lives in "stuff that's easy to automate" territory, the more nervous you should be.

This connects right back to the barbell from Parts 1 and 2. Digital gives you reach. Physical gives you a moat. Drop either one and you're exposed.

Written by Vlad UsenkoGrowth marketer who codes. I write about Webflow, marketing strategy, and building a one-person business.