Can AI agents make every creator better and more productive?
The creator economy keeps expanding, but so does the pressure on the people who make it run. Depending on which research you look at, there are somewhere between 50 and 300 million creators globally. Goldman Sachs estimates the creator economy could reach almost half a trillion dollars in the next few years. That’s a huge cultural and economic shift.
But the more creators there are, the more competition there is. And the more platforms encourage regular posting and constant engagement, the more exhausting being a creator can become.
In my latest TechFirst podcast, I spoke with Shahrzad Rafati, founder and CEO of RHEI, about a new set of AI agents she’s releasing on a platform called Made. They’re designed to support creators in doing the parts of the job that are not creative at all, and the goal is simple: help creators spend more time creating.
Watch here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel:
The problem: creators do everything
Being a creator is not just filming or writing or designing. It is:
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Research
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Scripting
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Shooting
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Editing
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Packaging (thumbnails, titles, metadata)
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Community management
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Distribution across multiple platforms
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Analytics and performance optimization
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Business operations
This is basically running a startup, but the difference is that you are also the product. Seeing that, it’s no surprise that creator burnout is real. Surveys suggest that more than half of creators have experienced it. Many have thought about quitting.
The idea: agentic AI as a support layer
Made is not about generating content automatically. It is about offloading the operational load.
The platform includes specialized agents, each focused on different parts of the workflow:
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Milo: helps with ideation, research, script development, and packaging elements like thumbnails and metadata.
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Zara: analyzes comments and audience signals, identifies superfans and sentiment patterns, and supports community engagement.
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A third agent handles workflow coordination.
What matters here is alignment. These agents are not generic chatbots, but are supposed to learn a creator’s tone, audience, and style. Ideally, they watch your YouTube channel and adapt based on what performs and what feels true to the creator.
This is part of a broader shift
The most interesting part of the conversation was not about any specific feature. It was about how work changes when AI moves from responding to prompts to autonomously helping with tasks.
We are starting to see this across many domains:
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Marketing teams using agentic AI to run experiments
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Customer support teams using agents to triage and route issues
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Product teams using AI to summarize and analyze feedback
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Personal productivity tools that act before you ask
This feels like the beginning of something similar for creators.
The future: creative focus becomes the differentiator
If AI can reduce the friction of research, planning, optimization, and community analytics, then what remains as the scarce resource is:
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Taste
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Perspective
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Imagination
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Originality
In other words; the human stuff. And, ideally, if the volume of content keeps increasing, the value of the unique voice goes up … important as we see more and more AI-generated content.
Key takeaway
Creativity is not the hard part for most creators. The workload around everything else is.
So if agentic AI can take away even half of the repetitive load, creators get to spend more time on the part that matters: making things people care about.
And that’s pretty interesting.