In ecommerce, creative content is everything: brands require a seemingly never ending stream of fresh videos and product visuals to test ad performance, update landing pages, and drive conversion.
But for many companies, especially those managing thousands of SKUs in areas like fashion and beauty, the dream of high-quality video content for all of their items has been far from reality.
After all, traditional studio shoots are expensive and time-consuming, which means many products go to market without the compelling visuals that drive modern ecommerce growth.
But the introduction of Creati's AI Ambassadors means the marketing world may now be closer to the dream.
With Creati, brands can upload raw assets -- like clothing, accessories, and product details -- and pair them with AI Ambassadors who mimic real human movement and emotion, allowing companies to produce quality video content at scale.
All without a shoot or a studio.
The company reports that the impact is steeply-improved conversion rates in brand ecommerce stores. As CEO and founder Ella Zhang shared, "After teams implement AI Ambassadors in their creative workflow, we consistently see a jump in conversion and a significant drop in customer acquisition costs. It's helping drive our own growth, now exceeding 10 million downloads and $10 million in annualized revenue in under a year."
But what sets Creati apart isn't just scale, it's the believability of its video content: "The hard part isn't lip sync," Zhang says. "It's making sure body language, facial expression, and voice tone are all in sync. If someone looks surprised but their cheeks and chin don't move, it breaks the illusion. Our technology fixes that."
As AI-generated content inches closer to replacing traditional production workflows, companies like Creati aren't just offering a shortcut, they're completely reshaping what's possible at meaningful scale.
How "AI Ambassadors" are an improvement over AI avatars
Although AI avatar technology has improved significantly in recent years, its lack of realism can be off-putting and create a disconnect with audiences, especially in marketing. A common criticism is that facial expressions and body movement is robotic.
Even with the highest-quality AI avatars who have quality audio and a good lip sync, AI avatars generally end up being floating avatar heads delivering a scripted message while a screen recording of the product's website plays in the background.
This approach broadly fails to create the natural and authentic interactions needed to build trust and engagement.
To create marketing videos that convert, videos need to show natural interactions with products, showcasing realistic facial expressions, smooth body movements, and a genuine sense of passion and emotion in their tone. This level of authenticity is crucial for building meaningful connections with audiences.
That's where "AI Ambassadors" step in.
Creating hyper-realistic AI Ambassadors is a uniquely challenging research problem that involves three critical components: natural interaction with real products, in-sync movements between the face, body, and mouth, and vocal emotion or inflections.
"We spent over six months researching this. One day, one of our engineers reached a breakthrough with a specialized encoder architecture. Much to our surprise, the consistency between the input product and the output videos improves a huge amount," shared Zhang.
The breakthrough in maintaining product consistency is the key to Creati's offer: an AI ambassador capable of realistically wearing, holding, and interacting with real products, as well as providing facial and physical expressions that are in-sync with mouth movements.
In order to make the voice sound like a real ambassador, Creati cooperated with more than 20 influencers, cloned their voice, tone and also the way they speak into a hyper-realistic profile, so that the "AI Ambassador" creation sounds really passionate and compelling when they sell.
The "responsible use" and ethics question
With the infiltration of AI in advertising comes significant ethical considerations.
What will people feel when they find out those ads are all from AI, instead of real people? Will they feel uncomfortable and lose the trust for the brand? Or will they accept this new format of messaging delivering?
"Our feeling is people will actually feel comfortable with 'AI Ambassadors' as long as sellers properly mark and let audiences know they are AI-generated," shared Zhang.
To address ethical concerns, Creati emphasizes stringent guidelines and security measures, as its policies stated with strict guardrails around what kind of usage is allowed and what's prohibited.
Zhang also suggests brands may blend AI avatars with real human influencers or real shooting videos to balance authenticity and efficiency, which could improve click-through rates by as much as 20% over older advertising content.
In any case, the time has come and the industry is well on its way to its next evolution.
