affable.ai CTO and Co-Founder Swayam Narain opens an email interview with e27 by sharing about the company’s first client back in 2017-18. It was a men’s fashion and apparel company trying to launch in Singapore through the use of male micro-influencers with a predominantly male following.

The client attempted to accomplish this manually and worked with various agencies but could never find the most suitable influencers until they began using affable.ai products.

“Using affable.ai, they had access to sieve through the data for every influencer in Singapore and were able to shortlist influencers in an hour! We were the only solution in Singapore with rich insights about any influencer’s followers. They had a successful launch and drove sales on day one through these influencers — a huge validation for us,” says Narain.

affable.ai builds an influencer engine on top of social media data that includes “best-in-class” machine learning models that add several layers of intelligence to raw data that is aggregated and indexed at a massive scale.

According to Narain, beyond saving users’ time, the company’s innovations include deep learning models to profile influencers, brands, audience interests, demographics, authenticity and engagement metrics, and more. It enables marketers to make data-driven decisions when it comes to influencer marketing.

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“Rather than relying on vanity metrics like an influencer’s followers or post likes or comments, we used data to suggest the right influencers. Using image analysis, we’ve built a language-agnostic solution that could be scaled to any market speaking any language,” he elaborates.

“Today, we’ve grown 100 per cent YOY while building a cash-efficient business. We continue to evolve by applying the most advanced technologies to solve pain points experienced when running influencer campaigns at scale.”

The company has just launched Skye–what it describes as the world’s first Generative AI (GenAI) companion in influencer marketing.

Empowering brand with magic search

Skye is an AI-powered tool developed by affable.ai in collaboration with Google Cloud to provide advanced capabilities for influencer discovery. The tool leverages cutting-edge GenAI technology, which enables it to analyse visual content and identify the best influencers for a particular campaign.

One of Skye’s key features is magic search, which allows brands to chat with Skye to find the best influencers for their use case. This feature is especially useful for marketers who are looking for influencers in a specific niche or with a particular aesthetic.

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For example, if a client is looking for pet influencers for their latest campaign, they can upload a moodboard to Skye, and the tool will analyse the images to find the perfect influencers.

Skye not only identifies that the marketer is looking for pet influencers, but it also identifies that the pet must be a small dog breed, wearing cute accessories and featuring multiple dogs. This capability is an industry first and is made possible thanks to the advancement in generative AI.

Skye also allows users to talk to it conversationally to refine the search results. For example, a user might say “10-50K followers, living in the US, min. one per cent engagement,” and Skye automatically applies these filters to the search results.

This feature helps marketers find in-context lookalikes, which are influencers who have a similar aesthetic or content style to the brand.

“We have received stellar feedback from marketers that have used this product, simplifying their workflow and significantly reducing the time it takes to find the ideal influencers. These are game-changing product features, and affable.ai is proud to be the first company in our industry to introduce them to influencer marketers. Importantly, these are not thin wrappers over GenAI APIs. We leaned in on our AI DNA and innovated both the user experience and the machine learning data services,” Narain explains.

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“We’re talking about several hours of trying to find the right creator all boiled down to searching using simple text or mood board uploads. A rigorous recommendation system suggests lookalike creators users can collaborate with. Using Skye to help send out personalised emails to creators at scale and even helping markets keep tabs on brand risk monitoring. This launch is a game-changer in the industry as we reimage how efficient the use of a platform like affable.ai can be.”

Narain says that affable.ai works with over 150 brands and agencies. The company is seeing a high level of interest in the adoption of Skye as it rolls it out.

“With our speed of execution, we aim to build upon Skye to offer a truly differentiated and reliable offering that brings delight to influencer marketers in their everyday tasks. Our early adopters see higher ROI through their Skye-recommended influencers already,” he stresses.

Influencing through data and insights

As a company that helps brands run their Influencer Marketing in-house with its end-to-end Influencer Marketing Platform, affable.ai works closely with marketers to identify all the manual steps in their workflows and automate them. Then it offers data and insights at every stage of the process which was lacking before.

“Unlike most companies which offer managed services, we offer a B2B SaaS-only subscription that allows marketers to run influencer campaigns at scale and own the relationship with their influencers,” Narain answers when asked about the company’s revenue model.

“We believe that influencer marketing delivers the most ROI when it is viewed as a long-term strategy to build influence around one’s brand. We love working with brands and marketing agencies over long-term influencer strategies to maximise their impact. This is why we only do yearly subscriptions.”

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In detail, affable.ai users are influencer marketing, social media and marketing leaders from brands and agencies.

“We run an efficient inbound and outbound system, with community building at the heart of it. Our long-term acquisition models are geared towards higher organic, direct and social models, which are already our major contributors. And for an almost six-year company, it showcases fantastic market interest and PMF,” Narain.

Narain says that in the company’s initial years, the challenge that it faced lay in the effort to drive awareness about why brands should work with micro-influencers and do it in-house. affable.ai tackled this challenge by building successful case studies to show the long-term impact and higher ROI when brands work with micro-influencers at scale.

“Today, as we expand internationally and bring affable.ai to more marketers, the main challenge is the perceived competitiveness of the industry. There are many players that offer campaign services or talent management services. We have put in a lot of effort to position ourselves as a tech player in a crowded agency world of influencer marketing.”

This year, affable.ai plans to lean further into GenAI and work with clients to identify and launch even more copilot use cases.

“Skye’s magic search is live, while the other capabilities are in active development. We aim to release more useful features that supercharge the workflow of our clients, making the platform do most of the heavy lifting so that marketers can achieve maximum ROI with minimum time,” Narain closes.

“We recently set up our US office and are expanding aggressively in this new market.”

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Image Credit: affable.ai

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