Upfluence Goes Fully Agentic With Jaice, Its AI Campaign System

Upfluence, the influencer marketing platform founded in 2013, completed a shift to a fully agentic business model earlier this year, powered by an AI system called Jaice that handles creator partnerships end to end — from writing campaign briefs to contacting creators and negotiating rates.

The move reflects a broader pressure on creator marketing software: being a simple conduit between brands and creators is no longer a differentiator. Upfluence's answer is to compress a process made of dozens of what CEO Vivien Garnès calls "micro decisions" into a single chat-based experience.

How Jaice works

Marketers upload their brand's website to Upfluence. Jaice scrapes the site and any publicly available historical data to infer details like the brand's audience and the likely cost of a collaboration with a given creator. Whatever it can't determine from the link, it asks the advertiser about directly through the chat interface.

The system is trained on thousands of past collaborations from Upfluence's historical data and can "contextualize" raw data pulled from social platforms. Garnès says Jaice can understand what drives creator pricing up or down — for example, whether a creator produced one longer piece of content later broken into shorter reels and TikToks, versus an ongoing series of new content delivered over a longer period.

For practitioners, the practical implication is scale without headcount: campaign strategy, creator selection, brief drafting, outreach and rate negotiation can all run through one automated workflow.

A two-way marketplace

Unlike some competitor platforms, Upfluence operates as a two-way marketplace. Marketers can approach creators, or creators can approach brands — and when a creator reaches out first, the brief and product are already intriguing to them.

When the brand initiates contact (or when Jaice does so on its behalf, since outreach is now automatable), the value proposition has to land immediately. Garnès says an upfront payment, rather than just a sales commission, tends to appeal more to creators and signals the brand's willingness to bear risk if the campaign underperforms.

Jaice's core function is matching the right creators to the right brands. Garnès distinguishes what he calls the "lazy way" of matching — say, a meal service advertising on any food-focused media — from what the AI can do: pinpoint a specific consumer subcategory, like new parents, that would find a meal delivery service most compelling, then build the brief around it and target creators whose audiences contain large numbers of those consumers.

Measurement and the quality bet

Upfluence has native integrations with most major ecommerce platforms, including Shopify and WooCommerce, giving it visibility into performance. It tracks how often buyers use a creator's unique content code and traces those purchases back to specific content.

The platform's positioning on creator selection is explicitly quality over quantity. With millions of online creators available, Upfluence aims to selectively find the best fit for a brand's product rather than maximizing the number of partnerships.

"Our job is not to have a bigger haystack," Garnès told AdExchanger. "It's to find the needles."

Context and caveats

The agentic pivot comes with a familiar origin story. Before founding Upfluence, Garnès and co-founder Kevin Creusy ran several ecommerce companies, including a men's apparel brand that Garnès describes as "doomed to fail." PPC ads and email marketing didn't move inventory; outreach to bloggers did — but finding the right bloggers, digging up their email addresses and persuading them to post reviews was slow, manual work. Upfluence was built as "a technological response to this problem," before the term "influencer marketing" even existed.

The company has not disclosed pricing changes, adoption figures or performance benchmarks tied to the Jaice rollout, so claims of improved matching and cost efficiency remain vendor assertions rather than independently verified results. Marketers evaluating the platform should weigh the promised automation gains against the absence of published outcome data.

If Jaice delivers on its matching and pricing models, the template it sets — AI handling the full brief-to-negotiation pipeline — could reshape how mid-market brands staff and budget creator campaigns.