Video was the marketing asset small firms rationed hardest: crews, studios and edit suites priced it as an occasional luxury. AI collapsed that cost, but unevenly, and the tools divide into three categories with very different maturity. Knowing which category your job belongs to matters more than any product pick inside it.
The categories at a glance:
| Category | Leaders | Maturity for business | First use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text-to-video | Veo, Sora, Runway | Powerful, hard to art-direct | B-roll, concepts, social attention |
| Avatar presenters | Synthesia, HeyGen | Production-ready today | Explainers, training, multilingual |
| AI-assisted editing | Descript, CapCut | Mature and cheap | Real footage, polished fast |
Text-to-video: the spectacular category
Type a scene, receive footage. Google’s Veo leads on realism in current use, OpenAI’s Sora made the category famous, and Runway built the most filmmaker-shaped toolset around its models, with fast-moving rivals behind them. The clips are genuinely impressive and genuinely hard to art-direct precisely: brand-exact results take many attempts, and consistency across shots remains the weak point. Business verdict: superb for atmospheric b-roll, concept work and social attention; not yet the dependable route to a precise 90-second product explainer. Costs are credit-metered, so budget attempts, not clips.
Avatar presenters: the workhorse category
A synthetic presenter reads your script to camera, in your choice of face, voice and language. Synthesia and HeyGen lead the category, with translation and lip-sync that make one script multilingual for pennies. This is the category that already works for service firms: training modules, service explainers, FAQ videos and announcements produced in an afternoon at subscription prices in the tens of pounds monthly. The limits are tonal rather than technical: an avatar delivers information credibly, but empathy-heavy messages still belong to a real face, which a phone camera plus the next category handles.
AI-assisted editing: the quiet multiplier
Tools like Descript make editing recorded footage as easy as editing text: delete the sentence, the video cut happens; remove filler words in one click; generate captions, tidy audio, fix an eye-line. CapCut covers the fast social formats. This category changes the economics of authentic video, the founder actually talking, by removing the edit-suite tax, and for trust-heavy firms an imperfect real human routinely outperforms a perfect synthetic one.
The honesty rules
Three lines keep AI video safe for a brand:
- Label synthetic presenters where a viewer could believe they are real: platform rules increasingly require it, and audiences punish discovered fakery harder than disclosed synthesis.
- Never fabricate social proof: synthetic “clients”, invented testimonials and staged results are the same lie at higher production values.
- Anchor claims to your written, checkable copy: a script is marketing copy, and every copy-honesty rule applies with a face attached.
Where I fit in
Video sits inside the Managed Websites work as a conversion asset: script drafted from your real copy, produced through the right category above, and placed where it moves decisions. If your site currently tells where it could show, a first explainer is a small, fixed piece of work; bring the service you most wish customers understood and that is the script.