New Delhi: If the recent AI Impact Summit delivered one clear takeaway, it is this: technology events are fast evolving into powerful commercial and influence hubs for brands and creators. Beyond unveiling new artificial intelligence (AI) products and showcasing the country’s tech ambitions, the summit emerged as a powerful platform for marketing partnerships, content monetization and digital engagement.
India's first AI summit, held in the national capital from 16 to 20 February, did what such mega events usually do: it generated hype, and drew crowds, but the more telling story unfolded on social media: Influencers earned a month's income in five days, brands learnt that their most effective marketing tool wasn't their booth but a creator with a smartphone, and small towns drove 65% of all online engagement around the event.
The trend points to a larger shift in marketing and technology communication strategies, with brands increasingly turning to creator-led promotion and online amplification to boost returns from large-scale physical events like the AI summit.
“For a creator like me who talks about AI and engineering, I found all the brands I could create content with under one roof. I earned in one week what I usually earn in a month from several of the collaborations with brands I had at the summit,” said Arsh Goyal, a tech and engineering content creator with 488,000 Instagram followers.
“I also got to meet the leadership of global tech giants and created content with them out of goodwill to build on my authenticity and long-term relationships with the brands,” Goyal added. He highlighted that content was not just created across YouTube and Instagram but also for the professional network on LinkedIn during the summit.
Exhibitors like government departments, tech giants, financial firms, and AI startups splurged on influencers to amplify their booths at the venue. Participants included the Department of Food and Public Distribution, ministry of skill development and entrepreneurship, Tata Group companies, Google, Mastercard, Meta, Exotel and Emergent AI.
“As a B2B company, we focused solely on tech influencers who demonstrated a solid understanding of our work and could represent us authentically through their expert voice,” said a Tata executive, requesting not to be named.
“Due to challenges arising from the ongoing social media chatter and the rush among influencers to create summit-related content, we followed a rigorous process of handpicking and vetting those we collaborated with for our booth,” the executive added.
"When brands invest in renting booths at large events, they typically hire influencers to showcase these innovations on social media. At the AI summit, this strategy was executed on a much larger scale. Since not everyone could attend in person, the majority of engagement took place online, allowing brands to maximize the return on their event investment," said Aditya Gurwara, co-founder of Qoruz.
"Creators serve as essential amplifiers for public events, but achieving true growth requires a specific scale," Gurwara noted. "Future summits will offer similar expansion opportunities for organizers and creators alike—provided [they] are of scale and have participation from global corporations to reach that necessary volume."
Global generative AI leaders partnered with massy as well as hyperlocal creators to reach beyond metros. “AI companies are democratising access and reaching deeper parts of India through multiple channels. While adoption started in metro cities, access is no longer limited to them,” said Akash Jadhav, co-founder and chief executive officer of Indian Farmer, a leading agriculture-focused digital platform reaching over 15 million followers across India.
“To promote practical and relatable use cases such as weather forecasting and crop understanding, some of these companies partnered with us during the AI Impact Summit,” Jadhav said.
Data from creator intelligence platform Qoruz underscores the frenzy. Over 16,000 posts flooded Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and X from more than 5,500 Indian creators during and around the event. Notably, 65% of total engagement came from small-town audiences.
Enthused by the surge in engagement, creators amplified their output with summit-themed content to fuel growth. “I could not visit the summit but I wanted to highlight and point out through my content how India is over-indexing on just the optics, and not talking about actual capability building, so I posted videos on it which performed three to four times better than usual in terms of views,” said Madhumita M, a geopolitical and social content creator.
“I usually do a lot of preparation for content, including research, writing interesting scripts with proper hooks to retain audience on my content, but the videos on AI Impact summit performed better than average because they were topical. Even after the large footfall, many did not actually get to visit the summit and were curious to know what was happening and were glued to the internet to get updates and opinions about it,” she added.
Thus, many brands ended up gaining showcase visibility without paying for marketing.
“We did not plan any influencer marketing activities at AI Impact Summit beforehand, but during the summit, many young influencers approached me with interesting questions around AI and featured me in their videos. Some of them had a decent following and helped our exhibition and launches get visibility on social media organically,” said Harshil Mathur, chief executive officer of fintech firm Razorpay.