Should You Use AI to Create an Explainer Video?
Type "make me an explainer video" into any of a dozen AI tools today and ninety seconds later you will have something. A voiceover, some motion, a tidy little script. It will look like an explainer video, and for the price of a coffee it will feel like a miracle. The question is not whether AI can make you an explainer video. It plainly can. The question is whether the thing it hands back will actually do the job an explainer video is hired to do, which is to make a stranger understand your product and trust you enough to buy it. That is a much harder test, and it is where the honest answer to "should you use AI explainer videos?" gets more interesting than the marketing wants it to be.
Our position, up front: AI is a genuinely useful tool for parts of the process, and a false economy if you let it do the whole job. Used well it saves you time and money. Used lazily it produces something forgettable that quietly costs you the sale. The difference is entirely in how you use it.
First, what an explainer video is actually for
An explainer video is a short piece, usually 60 to 120 seconds, that takes something complicated and makes it obvious. It answers "how does this work and why should I care" in the time most people give you before they click away. Done properly it is one of the hardest-working assets you own: 96% of people say they have watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service, and 85% say a video has convinced them to buy (Wyzowl, 2026). People do not just tolerate these videos. They use them to decide.
That is the bar. Not "did we produce a video", but "did the video change what someone thought and did". Hold that in mind, because it is the bar AI-only output tends to miss.
AI is not coming to explainer video. It is already here
This is not a hypothetical debate. 63% of video marketers now use AI tools to help create or edit their videos, up from 51% the year before (Wyzowl, 2026). The tools generate scripts, clone voices, build motion graphics and localise a video into a dozen languages before lunch. Anyone telling you to ignore all of that is selling you something, and it is not good advice. We use AI ourselves in places, and we have written before about where AI genuinely helps in video production and where it does not. The useful conversation is not "AI or not". It is "AI for which parts".
The honest case for using AI
There are three real advantages, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Speed. A rough animatic or a first-draft voiceover that used to take days can now take an afternoon. For internal videos, quick social cutdowns, or testing a script idea before you commit budget, that turnaround is a gift.
Cost. For a very early-stage business with nothing on the page at all, a simple AI-assisted explainer is better than no explainer. If the choice is genuinely between an AI video and silence, take the video.
Localisation. This is where AI for explainer videos is quietly brilliant. Need the same 90-second piece in French, German and Spanish? AI voice and subtitle tools make versioning fast and cheap in a way that was previously the preserve of big budgets.
Where AI explainer videos fall down
Now the other side, because the pros come with a bill attached.
It looks like everyone else's. AI is trained on what already exists, so it regresses to the average. The output is competent and completely generic, which is a problem when the entire point of the video is to make you memorable. A video that could belong to any of your competitors is not selling your difference.
It cannot do nuance. The reason an explainer works is emotional as much as informational: a pause in the right place, a line of script that lands because it understands the customer's actual frustration, a visual metaphor that makes the penny drop. That is creative problem-solving, and it is precisely the thing AI cannot originate. It can remix. It cannot understand.
The "saving" is often a mirage. Raw AI output rarely ships. It needs tweaking, re-prompting, fixing the bits that are almost right, and stitching it into something coherent. Teams routinely discover that the human oversight required to make AI output usable eats the time and money the AI was supposed to save. Cheap and fast on the tin, fiddly and average in the edit.
None of this is an argument against the technology. It is an argument against expecting a tool to supply the judgement.
Why a production company still earns its fee
Here is the part it is tempting to skip when a subscription costs less than lunch. An explainer video is not a cost you are trying to minimise. It is an asset you are trying to get a return on, and the return comes from the video actually working. A good production team starts with your customer and your goal, not a template: they interview you, find the one idea worth building the film around, write a script a human wrote, and make deliberate choices about tone, pace and look that an average-seeking model will never make. When we made the explainer for Expend, the job was turning a genuinely complex fintech product into ninety seconds a busy finance lead could grasp. That is not a prompt. That is craft, and it is the reason the video converts rather than just existing.
The temptation is to save a few hundred pounds up front. The trap is that a generic video underperforms for years, and the true cost of an explainer that nobody remembers is every customer it failed to win. If you want to think about that properly, we broke down how to measure the ROI of an explainer video in its own piece. Judge the spend on what it returns, not on the sticker price.
How to use AI on your explainer without regretting it
So use AI. Just use it as an assistant, not the author.
Write the script with a human, or at least rewrite whatever AI drafts so it sounds like a person who knows the customer, not a language model hedging its bets. Use AI to speed the mechanical stages: rough storyboards, placeholder voiceover, first-pass captions, quick localisation. Keep the strategy, the story and the final creative calls with someone who can actually think about your specific business. And be honest about the job at hand: for a throwaway internal update, AI on its own is fine. For the explainer on your homepage that has to earn trust and sell, that is exactly the wrong place to accept the average. If you are still weighing whether the format is worth it at all, we have made the fuller case for whether explainer videos actually work elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI make a good explainer video on its own?
It can make a passable one quickly and cheaply, which is fine for low-stakes internal or test videos. For anything that has to build trust and drive a sale, raw AI output tends to be generic and emotionally flat, so it usually underperforms a properly produced video.
Is it cheaper to use AI for an explainer video?
On the surface, yes. In practice the saving often shrinks once you account for the human time spent re-prompting, editing and fixing AI output to make it usable. The right question is not which is cheaper to make, but which actually returns more once it is live.
What is AI genuinely good at in explainer video production?
Speeding up mechanical stages and, above all, localisation. AI voice and subtitle tools make versioning one explainer into multiple languages fast and affordable. It is weakest at strategy, original storytelling and emotional nuance.
Should a small business use AI for its explainer video?
If the realistic alternative is having no video at all, a simple AI-assisted explainer beats silence. As soon as the video matters to winning customers, it is worth involving a production team, even a small project, so the film actually does its job.
Make your mark
AI is a good tool and a poor author. It can help you make an explainer faster, and it cannot make the choices that make an explainer work. If you are in Leeds, West Yorkshire or anywhere in the UK and you want an explainer video that genuinely earns its place, built by people rather than averaged by a model, we would like to help. Rune Films makes explainer videos that are made to be seen. Get in touch and let us make your mark.