How AI is pushing partnership marketing to new levels of power and performance

AI is changing the way we interact with businesses through chatbots; helping advance medical and healthcare science; and even translating dog vocalisations (or barks) into English.

Everywhere you look, AI is making its presence felt, and that includes partnership marketing. One of AI’s real strengths is its ability to process vast quantities of data at lighting speed to granular levels. This is making it an extremely potent tool in the space, and the most innovative platforms are harnessing its power to tackle some of the industry’s biggest challenges.

These include pain points surrounding adoption, performance, usability and analysis. Increasingly, AI is also helping brands capitalise on the disruption that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are bringing to the digital advertising industry.

As a result, AI is making partnership marketing more efficient and effective than ever. It is facilitating digital ad campaigns with greater scale and performance than previously possible, and cementing partnerships as one of the most exciting, dynamic and powerful forms of digital marketing.

Flattening the learning curve

Partnership platforms are powerful, innovative and crammed with advanced technology. The risk is that the complexity, alongside the sheer number of features a platform offers, can make it intimidating to use and hard to leverage to their best potential. The result? Marketers decide that communicating, commissioning and contracting partners is just too much effort.

Fragmented workflows exacerbate this issue, especially if a range of partnership marketing products are involved. If this is the case, overall performance can be hard to measure and understand accurately, negatively impacting campaign performance, analysis, future optimisation and strategy.

One such solution are AI-powered conversational interfaces such as chatbots or assistants that make it quick and easy for users (who might not be particularly technical) to engage the platform’s features, simultaneously reducing in-platform time.

AI assistants can recommend potential partners, generate contracts, produce measurement reports and generally reduce workflow around administrative tasks, allowing advertisers to focus their attention elsewhere.

Partner discovery and commissioning

Success in the partnership space is defined by a brand being able to find the right partners. Get the correct mix of creators, B2B partners or affiliates, and you’re on your way to building a successful programme.

In recent years, various automation tools have made it faster and easier for marketers to discover the right partners, but AI is really accelerating what’s possible. Whereas this process was once largely manual, search-based and time-consuming, AI can now recommend appropriate partners for a brand to work with. This allows marketers to scale their campaigns automatically, while keeping a vice-like grip on partner quality. Both contribute to increasing campaign performance.

Commissioning and contracting partners has always been something of a manual bottleneck for marketers. Agreeing rates and terms with hundreds of partners is a time-consuming, resource-intensive process. Again, AI is changing that, automating and agreeing contracts with partners and tying terms into a brand’s programme goals. Even more impressive is that AI can take this a step further, and benchmark commission rates to suggest adjustments to a partner’s contract in real-time based on their performance.

Partner analysis and insights

AI is transforming campaign analysis, and the level of insight available to marketers. Many platforms out there can report on how a campaign has performed… yet won’t provide a full picture of why it has performed a certain way, and how to react in shaping future strategy.

AI is changing that to provide granular, aggregated reporting that now includes detailed insights that interpret results. For example, AI widgets will tell you why a metric changed, or suggest action to reverse an unwanted trend. The most advanced solutions – like impact.com – can even scout for context external to the platform, such as trends and industry benchmarks, to enrich analysis and insight.

Also Read: The CMO’s Guide to Martech ROI: Measuring What Truly Matters

As its influence expands, understanding how your partnerships affect your brand’s perception on social media is increasingly important. This is an area where AI social listening has the power to deliver unique insight, and is even being used to understand how competitor brands are performing, helping your creator partners understand the impact of their content.

In tandem, partner content is also a key driver of LLM mentions and sentiment. Partnership platforms that extend their social listening experience and technology into the chat space offer unique insight helping brands and partners understand how they are being ‘spoken about’ within these new consumer facing tools.

Generative AI, Agentic Commerce, and ChatGPT are as much industry disruptors as they are technologies. In addition to the intelligence and automation being built into solutions like impact.com, platforms are focussing on tools to allow brands and partners to track, measure, and engage with LLMs as consumer facing applications. Early betas include tools for brands to understand chat sentiment and mentions, engage with AI applications through unique offers and content, and content authenticity verification.

As AI’s power and potential is realised, partnership platforms are deploying it to create AI-assisted experiences through agents, contextual intelligence and integrated automation. This makes partnership solutions easier to use than ever, more intelligent, and faster to act, driving performance while tackling some of the industry’s thorniest challenges