As consumer brands become more successful at utilizing influencer marketing to achieve their target ROI, operations need more human resources to scale. While other marketing channels have advanced to programmatic efficiency, creator partnerships still operate through fragmented, labor-intensive processes with multiple middlemen.

Tom Hollands, CEO and co-founder of London-based Agentic Marketing Technologies (AMT), recognized this limitation while managing creator partnerships at climate tech company Wren. 

“Influencer marketing is the best-performing channel for consumer brands today, but it’s the hardest channel to scale because it scales today with headcount,” Tom explains. “I personally spent millions on influencer marketing and discovered how time-consuming it was to negotiate these partnerships.”

The inefficiency extends beyond time—it’s structural. For large brands, the partnership process involves multiple parties, each taking substantial cuts. “If you’re a Fortune 500 company like L’Oreal, you hire an agency, and that agency may hire another agency in the middle,” Tom explains. “And then there’s a talent agency on the other side advocating for the influencer.”

This value chain creates a cascade of fees: “This first agency will take 15% to 25% of media spend. This middle one will take around 10%, and the third one will take 20% to 30%,” Tom reveals. “That’s insane. And not to mention that you have the team at the brand themselves.”

Founded in 2024 and recently backed by a $3.5 million seed round led by NFX, AMT built Lyra—an AI employee that automates the influencer marketing workflow for consumer brands and digital startups. The company serves premium Shopify brands and digital consumer products seeking to increase creator partnerships without expanding their teams.

“We’re changing the laws of physics in this market by getting AI to do the work,” says Tom. 

Creating a Marketing Operating System

AMT’s approach goes beyond merely finding influencers or providing another tool in the marketing stack. 

What Tom and his team have built is a new operating system for creator partnerships—transforming influencer marketing from manual processes into something that resembles the efficiency of programmatic advertising.

“The experience that we’re delivering to our customers turns the kind of messy partnerships motion of influencer marketing into something that looks a bit more like Google AdWords,” Tom says. “You just go to a dashboard, put in your high-level goals, and then the agent finds you the right influencers, negotiates with them, ships them the products if you have a physical product, and handles all the lower-level manual work.”

This system provides end-to-end automation across the entire influencer marketing workflow:

1. Sourcing: Lyra builds lists of potential creators based on complementary brands and semantic searches across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. “We have built a semantic layer on top of Instagram data so we can search Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube for any kind of content niche,” Tom explains.
   
2. Vetting: The AI evaluates creator fit by watching their content. “You can get the AI to watch the content and ask a question like how old is this creator? Are they within the age range of, let’s say, 28 to 45?” Tom says.
   
3. Outreach and Negotiation: Lyra sends personalized messages and negotiates terms—even in multiple languages. “Large language models were actually invented for language translation. So they’re insanely good at languages,” Tom notes.
   
4. Fulfillment: The system integrates with Shopify and other e-commerce platforms to ship products and create discount codes.
   
5. Performance Tracking: Lyra automatically detects when content goes live and provides detailed reporting on both social metrics and sales data.

The Unique Value Proposition

What distinguishes AMT’s solution from other influencer marketing tools is their automation method. Rather than providing point solutions for specific tasks, AMT has built a system that handles the entire process from end to end.

“Our approach is to deliver the entire service end to end. So, instead of building one tool that finds you influencers, we do everything. So it means we have to build nine products in one,” Tom explains. “But we believe it’s the right way to deliver. Ultimately, what the customer cares about is results.”

This approach to automation creates three key advantages for brands:

1. Scale Without Headcount: Brands can run thousands of partnerships simultaneously without expanding their teams. AMT currently handles approximately 3,000 influencer partnerships per month with a team of just five people.

2. Better Creator Experiences: Contrary to expectations, AI can actually provide more personalized attention than human teams. “AI can spend an infinite amount of attention per creator. It can watch the creator’s content and then send a personalized follow-up based on their most recent posts. Human beings do not have time to do this,” Tom points out. “Lyra sends every creator a thank you email when their content goes live.”

3. Direct Economic Impact: Eliminating middlemen and enhancing efficiency translate to measurable results. As Tom notes, “For one of our customers, we’re driving 15% of net sales directly attributed through discount codes. The real sales we’re driving are probably 2-3x higher. So we’re driving up to 45% of revenue for this large premium Shopify brand.”

Case Study: Le Petit Lunetier

Le Petit Lunetier, a premium French eyewear brand, faced a challenge as it expanded into Belgium and Switzerland. It needed to scale its influencer partnerships without compromising its signature French identity, but its small internal team was quickly becoming overwhelmed.

The brand turned to AMT’s Lyra to handle its entire influencer marketing program. The results were the following:

• 1,000+ creators went live in just one month
• 100,000 outreach emails sent
• Successful operations across 7 markets in 3 languages
• 5.8x Return on Investment

“Lyra handled creator sourcing, outreach, partnership management, and even reported on the content in pretty much real-time,” explains Hollands. The AI’s natural language capabilities preserved Le Petit Lunetier’s French flair in every communication, ensuring higher response and conversion rates from influencers.

The system automated repetitive tasks from initial contact to contract negotiation and follow-up while providing real-time dashboards for tracking campaign metrics and ROI. This freed the Le Petit Lunetier team to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Tom’s Take on Brand-Creator Relationships

Tom sees AMT’s technology facilitating more authentic connections between brands and creators by removing intermediaries currently dominating the market.

“What brands want and what creators want is direct relationships with each other,” he explains. “I believe that AI will facilitate these direct relationships. And you know you’ll have an AI facilitating the partnerships, but then the brand will be able to host more in-person events with their creators.

This vision redefines the role of human marketers. Rather than spending their time on repetitive tasks, marketing teams can focus on creative direction and community building.

“Humans have a really important role to play when it comes to thinking about the message. For example, that would be like designing a creative brief,” Tom says. “And building in-person relationships with influencers. So I think more and more brands will want to build communities on top of their influencer program.”

He envisions an environment where AI handles recruiting and partnership logistics while marketing teams focus on hosting events and building deeper relationships with creators: “Imagine you’re concentrated within several U.S. cities, and you get AI to recruit a thousand influencers, 100 in each city. Then the human role can be hosting an event with these 100 influencers in each city.”

Building a Data Advantage

As AMT continues to scale, they’re accumulating valuable data that creates additional network effects and defensibility. 

“We are capturing data on all of these partnerships and all of the relationships that the brands have with influencers,” Tom notes. “Once you know how much influencers are charging, which ones are making sales, and which ones aren’t, you can make it easier to facilitate the matching between brands and creators over time.”

This data asset, Tom adds, positions AMT to potentially transcend influencer marketing to a broader transformation of marketing execution.

“The ultimate vision is we do all marketing execution,” he shares. “We’re just the execution layer in marketing, and you can build a small team of highly creative people who come up with the message and the way they want to go to market, and then we just deploy that message on whatever channel works best.”

Tom believes that the company’s growth—with revenue increasing by 140% in just one month—shows that this approach is resonating with brands. Their biggest challenge now, he reveals, is building fast enough to meet demand. “There are just more people that want to use our product than we can currently deliver today,” Tom admits.

For creator economy professionals, AMT aims to help brands and creators connect at scale, eliminate inefficiencies, and enable more genuine relationships. 

As Tom puts it, “AI will enable direct relationships between brands and creators. The brands themselves will have more ability to be creative in their marketing, and creators themselves will have more time to spend doing what they do best.”