Utkarsh Khandelwal believes most marketing technologies misunderstand the real problem they are trying to solve.

“People don’t want to use software. They don’t want chatbots telling them what to do,” he says. “We want AI to do the boring stuff.”

As founder and CEO of Infloso AI, Utkarsh is building what he describes as an AI-powered execution layer for the Creator Economy. Founded in 2021, the company began as an influencer marketplace connecting brands and creators. Today, it operates as an AI SaaS platform serving approximately 11,000 businesses and working with 2.2 million influencers each month, according to Utkarsh.

The shift came after years of observing a consistent pattern across companies of all sizes. “No matter how big or small the company was, or how large the marketing team was, they were unsatisfied with their outcomes,” he says.

That dissatisfaction led Utkarsh to focus on a specific friction point inside influencer marketing workflows.

“We realized it was a simple problem,” he says. “People don’t know what to do.”

From that insight emerged Molly, Infloso AI’s orchestration system, which he describes as “a complete AI marketing agency for a brand.”

From Marketplace to Intelligence Layer

Infloso AI did not begin as an AI agent company. It started as a marketplace, onboarding roughly 1.5 million influencers and facilitating nearly $50 million in gross merchandise value, according to company data.

But after building scale, Utkarsh and his team began reassessing the underlying market gap.

“What the market needs is enablement,” he says. “We need infrastructure that supports the human element. It’s a creative process.”

Instead of trying to replace agencies or restructure how brands already work, Infloso AI shifted toward building systems that support marketers rather than override them. That pivot led to Molly.

“It becomes the second brain of your organization,” he says.

How Molly Operates

Molly is not a single chatbot interface. It functions as “an orchestration agent with hundreds of specialized micro agents underneath,” Utkarsh explains. “One handles influencer discovery, another negotiations, another Google Ads, and so on.”

Brands begin by sharing a website or social handle. Molly analyzes publicly available data, competitor activity, industry reports, and pricing structures. It can then connect to internal systems such as Shopify, Amazon, CDPs, and social platforms to build a brand-specific intelligence layer.

“All brands care about is how much they’re spending and whether they’re achieving their goals,” Utkarsh says.

Instead of requiring marketers to define campaign structures in detail, brands input three core elements: budget, objective, and desired outcome. Molly handles influencer scouting, outreach, negotiation, aesthetic alignment, content pre-vetting, permission-based posting, attribution tracking, payments, and post-campaign reporting.

“It constantly does social listening for your brand,” he says. “It tracks everything happening in your industry.”

The system can also proactively surface opportunities. If a competitor is running a campaign that appears to be working, Molly can recommend a similar approach and suggest a budget.

For larger enterprises, Utkarsh highlights speed as the immediate benefit: “Things that used to take two weeks now take two hours.”

According to the tech entrepreneur, faster cycles lead to higher spend. Brands previously allocating $10,000 monthly to influencer marketing are now spending $22,000 to $25,000 on average as turnaround times shrink and confidence grows.

Execution at Scale

While many influencer tools focus on discovery or analytics dashboards, Utkarsh believes the complexity lies elsewhere.

“The most critical and challenging part is execution,” he emphasizes. “One brand manager working with a thousand influencers, each with different conditions and timelines, that’s the challenge.”

Agencies have historically absorbed that operational burden. Infloso AI aims to replicate that layer in software. “Instead of just telling you the solution, Molly asks, ‘Can I do this for you?’”

That approach extends to creators as well. Utkarsh notes that many of the 2M+ influencers on the platform are unrepresented. “Most creators don’t do content creation as their primary income,” he says. “They don’t know how to negotiate or find brands.”

Infloso AI allows creators to sign up without exclusivity. Negotiation and coordination can even happen through WhatsApp, reducing friction for part-time creators who do not want additional workflow complexity.

Differentiating From AI Hype

Utkarsh does not mince words about the broader impact of AI on influencer marketing.

“Every day there’s a new platform claiming to be the revolution in the Creator Economy,” he says. “But most of it is the same.”

In his view, many platforms rely on extrapolated public data, whereas Infloso AI leverages consent-based data from its creator community, along with cross-platform analysis. “We create a tree of influence,” he says. “We measure indirect engagement across platforms.”

Instead of focusing solely on visible engagement metrics, the system attempts to understand deeper network effects, mapping not only who engages with content but also who those audiences follow and interact with across platforms.

Still, Utkarsh believes the industry remains in an early stage.

“This is still early for the Creator Economy,” he says. “People think it’s matured, but it hasn’t.”

Entering the U.S. Market

Infloso AI operates across Asia and the Middle East and is expanding into Russia, Europe, and the United States. The U.S. push required product simplification.

“In the U.S., people want fewer features. Just get the main thing done. No noise,” he says.

Utkarsh admits that assumptions about enterprise adoption did not automatically translate into broader market penetration. “We thought cracking a Fortune 50 meant we could crack everyone. We were wrong.”

The company is now conducting what he describes as a “hygiene check,” working closely with smaller and mid-market U.S. brands to understand usage behavior before scaling aggressively. “Their default expectations are low,” he says. “Reluctance to try new platforms is high.”

To lower that barrier, Infloso AI offers initial campaigns with minimal risk. “We do the first campaign for free. Only pay if you like it. If you don’t, take your money back.”

For Utkarsh, year-one success in the U.S. would mean crossing approximately $10 million in annual recurring revenue and servicing 400 to 500 active brands, while the immediate goal is onboarding at least 100 brands in the first phase of expansion.

Industry Outlook

Utkarsh sees two immediate shifts unfolding in the Creator Economy. 

First, a move away from AI-generated noise toward authenticity. “People are pushing back and going more toward authenticity,” he says.

Second, brands are prioritizing long-term partnerships over one-off performance experiments. “Brands succeeding are doing a lot of experimentation,” he says. “They give it time to mature.”

Short-term expectations, Utkarsh argues, often lead to disappointment. “A lot of brands think, ‘I’ll put in a thousand dollars with five influencers, and it will work.’ They always fail.”

In the long run, he predicts “consolidation,” in which a small number of large platforms will integrate talent, brands, and technology into standardized ecosystems.

Infloso AI’s ambition is to become that default infrastructure layer. But the principle guiding the company remains behavioral rather than technical.

“Stop pushing features,” Utkarsh says. “Understand people and enable their habits.”