I went to my first LTK Con last week expecting to learn more about creator commerce. I left blown away by the entrepreneurship in this female corner of social media.

LTK is a 15-year old creator commerce platform that lets creators publish shoppable content and earn commissions when people purchase through their recommendations. It also connects creators with brands for paid partnerships and gives both sides analytics to understand what is driving sales.

I met women who have built million-dollar businesses by sharing what they genuinely love with communities that trust them. According to LTK, its ecosystem now includes 44 million monthly shoppers, 500,000 verified creators and 8,000 integrated retail partners.

And 464 LTK millionaires.

That number is impressive. It also represents less than one-tenth of one percent of the creators in the network.

So yes, the platform clearly works. But the platform is only part of the story.

LTK created the infrastructure that allowed creators to turn recommendations into measurable businesses. The creators still had to build the audience, develop their judgment and show up consistently enough for people to trust what they shared.

The platform makes the business possible. The person behind it makes the business valuable.

One of the slides at LTK Con showed the Instagram posting benchmarks for a top creator: 13 Stories and 1 Reel every day.

Another case study followed a creator who began posting 12 Stories and 1 Reel daily, plus one or two carousel posts each week. She increased how often she linked products and made more of her content shoppable.

Those changes helped drive 363 percent earnings growth.

That result is incredible, but so is the amount of work behind it.

Posting at that volume is a full-time job. And posting is only one part that everyone can see.

Behind every piece of content, someone is sourcing products, communicating with brands, tracking links, and studying analytics. They are negotiating contracts, planning what to make next, and managing the financial side of the business.

Many creators are doing all of it alone until they reach enough revenue consistency to hire support.

This is one of the realities companies often miss when they talk about scaling creator marketing and businesses. A creator may be the talent, but they are also running the entire operation surrounding the talent.

That is why the phrase "the work surrounding the work" is always an important one as we discuss the opportunities around creators at scale.

I was also impressed by Amber Venz Box's founder story.

She didn’t just start LTK because she had money, saw a hot new market and decided to enter the creator economy.

She was a personal stylist and creator in the early internet days, who noticed that people were buying products because of her recommendations, but she had no way to participate in the value she was creating.

So she built what she needed.

That difference matters, especially now that so many companies are entering the creator economy because they see a business opportunity.

Amber understood the problem because she had lived it herself. She recognized that creators were influencing commerce before the rest of the business world had language for what they were doing.

LTK didn’t just create the trust between a creator and her audience. It created a way for that trust to become a business.

Entrepreneur and Best-selling author, Emma Grede, was also interviewed by Amber on stage, describing her career in a way that resonated. Her 20s were about hustling, her 30s were about failing and her 40s have been about building.

Today, people see the cofounder of Good American and a founding partner of SKIMS. They see the incredible success and recognition.

They see the flowers, but they don’t see the hours and what it took to get there and maintain that position.

The same is true for successful creators. We see the audience and the sales. We don’t see the years spent posting without knowing whether any of it would become sustainable.

Success can look inevitable when we tell the story backward. It rarely feels that way while someone is living it.

Of course, LTK also used the event to unveil a range of new AI products and features.

On the creator side, LTK announced a refresh of its analytics. Creators will have a clearer view of what is generating revenue across individual posts, product links and brands.

That matters because creators need access to the same kind of business intelligence as any other entrepreneur. They should be able to see what people clicked and what actually produced earnings.

LTK also previewed Auto Draft, an upcoming feature that can recognize products featured in a creator's content and help prepare the corresponding LTK post.

Auto Draft will not create the relationship that makes someone care about a recommendation. It can reduce the repetitive labor required to turn that recommendation into something shoppable.

For someone running a creator business alone, that efficiency matters.

The brand announcement was even bigger.

LTK introduced a new agentic experience for its Brand Platform. A marketer will be able to describe what they want to accomplish, and the system can help design a campaign, identify relevant creators and recommend what the brand should do next.

The technology is built on their over decade of creator commerce intelligence and more than 100 billion signals across creator, consumer and brand activity.

The number of creators brands invest in has increased by more than 275 percent in the past year. As brands manage larger creator programs, they need more than a list of names and a campaign report several weeks later.

LTK wants its system to help brands move from an objective to an actionable campaign while continuously looking for opportunities to improve performance.

This brings both sides of the creator economy into sharper focus.

Creators get better information about what is working in their own businesses. Brands get a clearer view of which creators and content are producing results, including reporting that can track sales and return on ad spend.

That transparency could address one of the most frustrating parts of creator marketing. Creators often don’t know how brands are evaluating them, while brands still struggle to connect individual content to actual business outcomes.

The best use of AI here isn’t replacing the creator. It’s giving people working alone more leverage while helping brands make better-informed decisions.

AI can do more of the work surrounding the work. It can’t do the work beneath the work.

The bigger question in this next era is also how much we should trust these systems to identify influence.

Over dinner, I was talking with exec Jamie Gutfreund, journalist Lia Haberman and Axios media reporter Kerry Flynn, who have all spent years working in and covering the creator economy.

We kept returning to a reality familiar to anyone who has worked in digital marketing. Despite all the platforms and analytics, a surprising amount of the work is still manual.

You look at the data, but you also ask people you trust who they are watching. You notice whose ideas are traveling through the industry before their numbers reflect it. Sometimes a recommendation from someone deeply embedded in a community tells you something a dashboard cannot see yet.

Until the technology consistently surfaces the same people that knowledgeable humans are recommending, it will feel like the system is missing something.

There is also a danger in optimizing entirely around what is easiest to measure.

We saw this with SEO. People learned how to satisfy the system, but the content that ranked highest was not always the most useful or original. Creator technology could develop the same blind spot if it rewards people who are best at producing the signals the system recognizes.

Sales are meaningful. A creator who consistently converts has clearly built trust with an audience.

But sales and cultural influence are not identical.

Someone can move a huge amount of product without being widely known outside a specific shopping community. Another creator may not generate the same immediate sales, but could be shaping language or influencing the people who will determine what becomes popular next.

One is not necessarily more valuable than the other. They serve different purposes, and brands need to understand which one they are actually trying to achieve.

That is the challenge for AI powered creator marketing.

Can it measure what has already happened while also recognizing influence before it becomes obvious? Can it distinguish between someone who has optimized for the system and someone whose point of view is genuinely changing the culture?

The most sophisticated technology will still need human context.

Data can tell you who converted, but it still currently takes people to tell you who matters next.

Creator advertising spending in the United States is projected to reach $44 billion this year. It’s growing four times faster than other advertising channels.

The technology will become more sophisticated, attribution will improve and more of the workflow will become automated.

But the reason creator commerce works is still deeply human.

People don’t want a storefront without a story. They want to know why someone chose a product and how it fits into their life. They want a recommendation from a person whose judgment they have learned to trust.

LTK proves what can happen when the right infrastructure supports that relationship. Its 464 creator millionaires are a remarkable success story for the platform, but they are also proof of the human work behind it.

The next era of the creator economy should make that work more sustainable. Let AI reduce the friction. Let platforms build better systems. But do not confuse the infrastructure with the value itself.

Auto Draft can help build the storefront. It can’t create the story.

AI can do your hours for you, but it can’t earn your flowers.

This is a BIG EVENT I’ve been workin on for a year…

My company, What’s Trending and TheWrap will be co-hosting AI Creator Day on Tuesday, September 29, 2026, in Los Angeles. AI is completely rewriting entertainment, and creators are rapidly becoming the new studios. We're bringing together digital storytellers, marketers, brands and tech leaders to explore where the creator economy and AI are heading next.

Apply to join us!

Remember, I'm Bullish on you! With gratitude,