BET's AI Play: How Louis Carr Rebuilt the BET Awards for Creators

BET's 2026 awards telecast, hosted by Druski, drew the network's highest ratings for the show since 2019 — an outcome its president, Louis Carr, credits to AI tools and a deliberate creator-first strategy. Carr laid out the approach on Tuesday, November 3, in the session "BET on Black: Louis Carr on Marketing in Every Era" at the AFROTECH Conference in Houston, which is marking its 10th anniversary and runs through Friday, November 6.

Carr assumed the BET presidency in December 2025 after 39 years with the company. At the conference, he framed his four-decade record in direct terms.

"For the last four decades, a lot of people said that I have sold advertising. I don't say that. I said I've educated corporations, white people and Black people, on the value of Black consumers," Carr said. "We have this thing at BET where we say, what Black people do today, the world does tomorrow."

What does AI change inside BET?

Carr positioned AI as an efficiency layer, not a replacement. "We're not looking at AI as something to sort of put anybody out of work. We don't want to do that. We want to use AI to enhance the things that we're already doing," he said.

He cited two concrete uses around the BET Awards:

• An AI app handled seating arrangements, a process he said can typically take days.
• AI helped the team compile names of people who had died within the past year for a memorial segment. "There were more people that we had just forgotten," Carr said.

AI also surfaced what Carr called the "top 25 creator influencers in the Black space" — a list that omitted Druski. BET then selected the comedian to host the 2026 BET Awards, and the broadcast became the highest-rated edition on the network since 2019, according to a press release. Druski built his audience through social media skits and holds an exclusive multi-year Netflix deal.

"We know we wanted to bring people who normally don't watch television to television. We knew we wanted an overall younger audience," Carr said. "You have to be courageous enough to take risks."

How the influencer strategy worked

The awards functioned as a case study in creator distribution. BET invited an estimated 120 influencers to a red-carpet event the night before the show, an occasion Carr said is normally private. Attendees could use their phones and cameras to capture content freely.

The network also moved its pre-show off linear television and onto YouTube. "It was a whole planned strategy around making the show younger, bringing people who normally don't watch linear television to television, and that's how we were able to be so successful," Carr explained.

Looking ahead, Carr said his legacy at BET — personal and brand-wide — will center on community, culture and connection, delivered through social platforms, live events, social impact initiatives and linear television. The Soul Train Awards will be taped in Chicago this year.

Carr's digital instincts come from personal experience. He launched Waymaker, a brand spanning a magazine, newsroom, live summit, podcast and community, without a budget. "I didn't have any money, so I really had to really embrace social media. There's no secret to it… I hated social media," he said.

His advice to creators was blunt: "Don't believe you don't have any power because you do have power." For BET, the 2019-defying ratings numbers suggest the AI-plus-influencer formula will extend well beyond one telecast.