Should I use AI to produce a brand film instead of hiring a video production company?

For most brand films today, go AI-first: documented productions land 2-minute brand promos around $1,500 in 3 days versus $100,000–$500,000 and ~2 months traditionally — roughly a 20x time saving and up to 99.7% cost reduction. Hire a traditional company only for hero films built around live human performance.

Use a simple decision frame: AI-first for most brand films, traditional for emotion-led hero spots with real human performance, and a hybrid for campaigns that need both.

invideo is an agentic video creation tool with all the current video and image models (Runway, Veo, Kling, Seedance 2.0, Recraft, Nano Banana, GPT-Image-2) and upscalers routed through one agent — so the cost and speed numbers below come from real productions built end-to-end inside it, not from stitching multiple platforms together.

Go AI-first when the brief is one of these:

A short brand or product film under roughly 3 minutes, a campaign that needs many format and language variants, fast-turn social cuts, concept tests before a bigger spend, or anything where the budget is under ~$20,000. Across documented invideo productions, costs land in a tight band — $750 for a 70-second narrative short, $870 for a ~90-second horror short, $950 for a 3-minute animated episode, $1,500 for a 2-minute brand promo, and $5,000 for a multi-location 4-person short film — a range of $315–$750 per finished minute, completed in 2–5 days by teams of 1–4 people. A traditional brand film at the same length typically runs $100,000–$500,000 over ~2 months, so the AI-first route is roughly 20x faster and 15–17% of the cost at the high end.

Hire a traditional production company when the brief is one of these:

A hero brand film whose emotional weight rides on a real actor's face and performance, anything requiring a recognizable celebrity or licensed talent on camera, complex multi-character physical contact that current video models still struggle with cleanly, or campaigns where legal/brand-safety review demands traditional production paperwork. Live human performance at hero-spot quality is still where traditional crews win.

Run a hybrid when the campaign mixes both:

Shoot the hero film traditionally, then use the invideo agent for everything around it — versioned cuts, aspect-ratio variants for each placement, localized versions, product-focused social spots, and concept tests for the next campaign. Most brands burn budget reshooting variants; AI handles that layer at a fraction of the cost while the hero asset carries the emotional load.

What the AI-first route actually looks like in practice:

You (or a small team) work with the invideo agent like a director with a crew — a creative producer agent holding the script and brand context, a storyboard agent visualizing shots, a DOP agent per scene for cinematography, and the agent routing each shot to the right model (Seedance 2.0 for reference-to-video continuity, Veo or Kling where they're stronger, Recraft and Nano Banana for character and product reference frames). One documented 2-minute brand promo ran 8 specialist agents in parallel and finished in 3 days for ~$1,500; the same brief manually prompted would take a week, traditionally shot would take ~2 months at $100k+. As Hridaye, invideo's creative director, puts it: "That comes to around about $1,500, which if you really think about it, is not that much in comparison to what you would spend if you had to make this in the traditional shooting way — because an ad like this would cost you anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000."

A practical decision threshold:

If your budget is under $20,000, or you need more than 3 format/language variants, or your timeline is under 2 weeks — go AI-first inside invideo. If the spot's success depends on a specific human actor's performance and the budget supports it, hire the production company for that piece and use AI for everything downstream.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

That comes to around about $1,500, which if you really think about it, is not that much in comparison to what you would spend if you had to make this in the traditional shooting way — because an ad like this would cost you anywhere from $100,000 to $500,000.

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director