Growing AI Profiles and Content
Making it easier to create AI profiles and create content for them on Instagram.
Context
Existing experience: optimized for building chatbots, not AI Profiles
In Q2 2025 we launched AI Profiles on Instagram, letting AI-curious creators express their creativity with AI. The experience was centered on chat: you built an AI character for others to talk to, and adding a profile for that AI came after the chatbot was already built.
Content creation on those profiles was thin. Creators could only post pre-made AI images.
Insights
Existing demand for AI content
Not everyone wanted a chatbot
A large share of AI content creators had no interest in building a character for others to chat with. They wanted to make and post AI content, but the chat-first flow made them build the chatbot first.
AI content was outperforming human posts
Organic AI content was growing rapidly across Instagram and Facebook, with higher engagement than human-created content. Roughly 21% of AI content from AI Profiles beat the median human post.
Approach 1: Increase AI Profiles
Make the profile fast to create
The old flow made every creator build a chatbot before they could get a profile. To test whether that was the bottleneck, I designed a shortened flow and we ran it as an experiment rather than a full launch. It cut the chat-only steps, led with the value of an AI Profile, and got creators to one in a few screens.
Target AI Content Creators
Quick promotions that lead with what an AI Profile is for
Targeted creators already showing intent to make AI content:
- People who post content made with Imagine, the existing AI edit feature on Meta.ai and across the family of apps
- People who have engaged with AI content frequently
- People who already built an AI chatbot but never created a profile for it
Approach 2: Grow AI Content
Show empty profiles what they’re missing
Creating a profile is only half the funnel. Plenty of AI Profiles were made and then never posted. For those, I surfaced posts already drafted for their character, so the first thing a creator saw was content ready to publish rather than an empty grid.
Approach 3: Enriching Content Creation
Add easier, richer ways to prompt
80% of creators using AI Profiles edited their content before posting, a clear signal they wanted more control than the prompt box gave them. So I enriched prompt suggestions based on what a creator had already made, and added ways to prompt with media instead of text.
Approach 4: Diversify Content Formats
Bringing content to life with videos
Video made up 42% of posts from top AI creators and drew 59% of the engagement on their content on Instagram. I designed multiple ways to make one: text to video, and text to image to video.
Result
The experiments grew AI Profiles on Instagram 10×, to 46.98K profiles created, and creator engagement grew 10× against the product-market-fit benchmark.