Video used to be the marketing asset small firms rationed hardest, because crews, studios and edit suites made it an occasional luxury. AI has cut that cost, but unevenly. The tools split into three groups at very different stages of maturity, and knowing which group your job belongs to matters more than which product you pick.
| Type | Leaders | Ready for business? | First use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text-to-video | Veo, Sora, Runway | Powerful, hard to art-direct | B-roll, concepts, social posts |
| Avatar presenters | Synthesia, HeyGen | Ready today | Explainers, training, multilingual |
| AI-assisted editing | Descript, CapCut | Mature and cheap | Real footage, polished fast |
Text-to-video is impressive but hard to control
You type a scene and get footage back. Google’s Veo leads on realism in current use, OpenAI’s Sora made the category famous, and Runway built the toolset most suited to filmmakers, with fast-moving rivals behind them. The clips are striking and hard to direct precisely: getting something on-brand takes a lot of attempts, and keeping things consistent from one shot to the next is still the weak point. It’s very good for atmospheric b-roll, concept work and social posts, and not yet a dependable way to make a precise 90-second product explainer. Pricing is by credits, so budget for attempts, not clips.
Avatar presenters already work for service firms
A synthetic presenter reads your script to camera, with the face, voice and language you choose. Synthesia and HeyGen lead here, and their translation and lip-sync make one script multilingual for very little. Training modules, service explainers, FAQ videos and announcements can be produced in an afternoon, on subscriptions in the tens of pounds a month. The limit is tone rather than technology. An avatar can deliver information credibly, but a message that needs empathy still belongs to a real face, and a phone camera plus the next type of tool handles that.
AI-assisted editing makes real footage cheap
Tools like Descript make editing recorded video as easy as editing a document: delete a sentence and the cut happens, strip filler words in one click, generate captions, tidy the audio. CapCut covers the quick social formats. These tools take most of the editing cost out of authentic video, the founder talking to camera, and for firms that sell on trust I think an imperfect real person usually lands better than a polished synthetic one.
Three honesty rules for AI video
Keep to these three and AI video won’t hurt your brand:
- Label synthetic presenters wherever a viewer could believe they’re real. Platform rules increasingly require it, and being found out later is worse than saying so up front.
- Never fake social proof. Synthetic “clients”, invented testimonials and staged results are the same lie with better production.
- Tie every claim to your written, checkable copy. A script is marketing copy, and every copy-honesty rule still applies when there’s a face on it.