Are AI Companies Running Influencer Campaigns on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is flooded with posts about AI. Every day, I read a new post about how we will be replaced by robots unless we master the robot. Posts about how to use AI to increase your LinkedIn engagement. There’s even data suggesting that over 54% of posts on LinkedIn were generated by AI.
I’m sure many of these posts are genuine conversations about AI. It’s a relevant topic, after all.
The communications strategist in me keeps wondering: Could AI companies be running influencer marketing campaigns on LinkedIn to promote AI use?
It’s exactly the strategy I’d pitch and run if I worked for an AI company.
I have no data or inside information to actually know if AI companies are running influencer or content marketing campaigns on LinkedIn. This is my speculation based on the explosion of AI-related content on LinkedIn, my instincts for strategy, and the challenges AI companies are facing to take their products to the next level.
A LinkedIn influencer campaign—flooding the space with genuine or AI-generated content about the benefits of using AI or the costs of not using it, targeted to knowledge workers on LinkedIn—would be a smart strategy to increase AI user adoption.
In the fall of 2024, a report by Epoch AI claimed companies had hoovered up the available data on the internet to train their LLMs, and folks were hand-wringing over whether the models could advance given the data shortage.
AI companies need to get users—particularly knowledge workers—hooked on their tools. It’s similar to the way Uber undercut ride fares to get folks hooked on their platform. AI companies need users not only to build a customer base, they also desperately need our data.
LinkedIn is the perfect platform to run an influencer campaign to increase the AI-user base and get more training data straight from users.
According to data from Hootsuite, executives from every Fortune 500 company are on LinkedIn and 54% of LinkedIn users are college graduates.
This is the platform to reach decision-makers. Knowledge workers. This is the audience that really could see job loss from AI, and also the audience that is best placed to bring AI-tools to their workplaces.
Message variations could easily be deployed and seeded with LinkedIn influencer-creators, quickly tested and measured via LinkedIn’s organic engagement metrics, and indirectly mapped to the ultimate goal of increased AI users.
LinkedIn influencer marketing replicates successful strategies that use creators and influencers on other social media platforms to sell products and ideas to consumers. It's all about the creator economy, nowadays.
It appears OpenAI is already running a public influencer campaign.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, and leaders from other AI companies, have been making the rounds, giving interviews on podcasts, hosting on-the-record dinners with journalists, speaking on panels, and having closed-door meetings on the Hill to promote AI. Why wouldn’t they also use LinkedIn to promote AI? As a marketing professional, it almost seems like malpractice not to do this.
I have mixed feelings about AI and the direction we’re heading with this technology. I think we made mistakes embracing social media platforms with too little oversight, and we’re reaping the negative consequences of those decisions today.
However, it does appear that AI is here to stay, and I believe it’s imperative to interrogate AI as a new technology tool and ruthlessly question its best use cases. If there are influencer campaigns promoting AI on LinkedIn, they’re likely pushing us toward adoption with little regard for the consequences.
To me, that means advocating for responsible AI use that centers humans--as users and consumers of AI-informed products--at the center of every conversation and critically interrogating how and when we integrate AI into our workflows.
It also means being aware of the posts you see online and the motives behind them. Good marketers know how to use social media to their best advantage--we haven’t been replaced by AI…yet.
