YouTube announced on Friday, October 10, that it is bringing its latest AI-powered features to creators who are part of its shopping affiliate programme in India, including the ability to swap out sponsored ads in long-form videos and include links to brands’ websites in Shorts. The Google-owned tech giant is also rolling out an AI-powered system that will automatically display the product tag at the moment the creator mentions the product in the video. The AI tool is designed to identify moments of peak viewer interest and expands on creators’ existing ability to manually tag products in their videos, as per YouTube. Interestingly, the AI product-tagging tool is not powered by Google’s flagship Gemini AI. YouTube said it will also start testing the tool’s ability to automatically detect and tag “all eligible products” mentioned in videos later this year. YouTube’s announcement comes at a time when generative AI is poised to reshape creator-led commerce. AI startups such as OpenAI and Perplexity have already introduced in-chat shopping and payments features, even as users move away from search engines like Google and e-commerce platforms like Amazon toward conversational AI agents that promise to offer a more personalised, frictionless online shopping experience. However, that is easier said than done, as companies like YouTube could restrict access to third-party agents to interact with or make automated purchases via creator videos on its platforms. “At the moment, that is not on the anvil to allow third-party agents to interact with the platform,” Gunjan Soni, Managing Director-India, YouTube, told The Indian Express in a virtual press briefing on Friday. Additionally, YouTube did not provide a specific response to queries about the accuracy level of its new AI product-tagging system and whether creators would be able to review and re-tag misidentified products. “The feature is about to be rolled out soon and we are doing several trials to better understand. By definition, generative AI is a learning algorithm so it will continue to learn and evolve like you said. The exact ways in which it will manifest will depend on the various trials that are happening at the moment,” Shubha Pai, Head of YouTube Sales and Solutions-India, said. Soon, eligible YouTubers in India will also be able to insert and replace brand segments in long-form videos as part of the company’s more flexible format. Furthermore, brands will be able to more easily discover new creators and integrate their content into their ads as part of the new Creator Partnerships Hub within Google Ads. New merchant partnerships Nykaa and Purplle have been onboarded as YouTube’s merchant partners. This means that eligible creators in India will now be able to further monetise their content by tagging products from both these beauty and lifestyle brands, in addition to e-commerce platforms Flipkart and Myntra. “YouTube will also launch a program designed to discover, enable, and accelerate the next generation of India’s beauty and lifestyle creators, with Nykaa,” the company said. Launched in India last year, the YouTube Shopping Affiliate programme enables creators to make more money off their videos by offering a range of features such as Product Stickers on Shorts and a new Chrome Extension that helps creators easily save products to tag in their videos later. The company said it has paid out a total of Rs 21,000 crore to creators on YouTube over the past three years. More than 40 per cent of eligible creators in India are enrolled in the YouTube Shopping affiliate programme, with 3 million videos carrying affiliate product tags. YouTube is also quickly emerging as a major shopping channel in India as over 200 million logged-in users carried out shopping-related searches on YouTube. Shopping-related watch time has grown by more than 250% year over year (YoY), with 88 per cent of Indian shoppers stating that YouTube is important for product research and decision-making. 85 per cent of surveyed users also said that they trust creator opinions on brands and products on YouTube.
