Sorav Jain on AI vs. Traditional Growth: How Smart Tech is Revolutionizing Instagram | Exclusive

Instagram is no longer just about posting pretty pictures and hoping for likes. The platform has transformed into a competitive space where data-driven strategies and AI-powered workflows dominate growth. Traditional methods, manual posting, hashtag experiments, and gut-based decisions are falling behind in speed and efficiency. To understand this shift, we connected with an expert, Sorav Jain, who shares why AI is the ultimate game-changer for creators and brands.

Here are a few edited excerpts of this conversation;

He says, "I've watched Instagram growth evolve from manual posting, hashtag experiments, and gut-based decisions to something far more powerful. Wearing the SJ hat, here's my clear point of view: traditional growth is effort-heavy and slow, while AI-driven growth is intentional, scalable, and unfairly efficient."

Audience Insights Over Assumptions:

He adds, "Today, AI workflows allow creators and marketers to deeply understand their audience avatar, what they want, how they think, and why they engage. With tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, content is no longer built on assumptions. It's built on insight. Ideas are validated before they're posted, not after they flop."

Photo Credit: Instagram

Visual Creation Without Limits:

He continues, "Visual creation is no longer a bottleneck. NanoBanana eliminates dependency on expensive product shoots or design-heavy carousels. You can create high-quality visuals, infographics, and even realistic AI avatars aligned to your brand. Add HeyGen for video avatars and ElevenLabs for voice cloning, and sharing opinions no longer requires perfect lighting, energy, or repeated shoots. Execution becomes frictionless."

Editing, Polish & Advanced Layers:

"Editing and polish are handled by tools like Captions.ai, while advanced visual layers from Higgsfield, integrated with models like Veo 3.1, Kling, and emerging Chinese tools, raise production quality beyond what most creators can achieve manually."

The Rise of AI Agents:

"But the real shift is AI agents. This is where creators stop using tools and start building systems. AI agents act as research analysts, scriptwriters, visual planners, and performance reviewers, working in the background while you focus on thinking and storytelling. Growth moves from post and hope to post, learn, optimize, and scale."

Scripting & Research Made Simple:

"For scripting, I use Vizard.ai to study viral formats and adapt them to my original ideas, while Claude works as a script agent trained on my writing style. With NotebookLM, I can run deep academic-level research on any topic and turn it into structured content workflows."

Cracking YouTube with AI:

"Even YouTube is cracked open. Using ChatGPT's YouTube summary extensions, I can extract hooks, scripts, and frameworks from long podcasts in minutes. Traditional creators stop at ideas. AI gives you wings, from discovery to execution," he concluded.