Democratizing Influence: Zitong Jia on Harnessing AI and Social Media to Empower Small Businesses and Non‑profits

At first glance, creative director Zitong Jia’s work appears rooted in the metrics of modern media—more than 150,000 cross-platform followers, millions of views, and a signature ability to make people stop scrolling within seconds. But underneath the numbers and viral moments is a mission far more human and urgent: to redistribute visibility in a world where attention has become a form of privilege.

For Jia, influence is not about fame. It is about fairness. She believes visibility should not belong only to major corporations or digital celebrities but to the people who need it for survival—small business owners, immigrant families, local artisans, and grassroots nonprofits. Their stories are often overlooked not because they lack value, but because they lack access.

This belief began years earlier, in her aunt’s modest sea cucumber shop in northern China. Despite decades of honest work, the store remained nearly empty most days. “She worked her entire life, but she never had the chance to be seen,” Jia recalls. “That was when I realized that many businesses don’t fail because they’re not good—they fail because no one ever sees them.”

Unlock creative wisdom

As AI technology matured, Jia began searching for a way to scale the kind of support she wished her aunt had. Using Coze, she built a multi-agent AI system intended not to replace her, but to encode her creative mind, strategic judgment, and lived experience into a repeatable workflow that small businesses could access anytime.

Her system is rooted in a foundational insight: technology alone cannot run a virtual marketing company—only experience can. The AI agents she created are not generic assistants; they function as structured extensions of her professional brain. The roles, knowledge libraries, and workflows were not generated automatically. They were carefully engineered from her years of frontline experience in short-form storytelling, cross-platform content operations, and brand partnerships. In essence, she translated her decision-making process into rules and frameworks that machines could execute.

To build the Content Strategy Agent, Jia deconstructed her intuitive sense of what makes a compelling short-form video. She split her judgment into concrete dimensions such as emotional tension, first-three-second resonance, contextual specificity, shareability, and alignment with platform algorithms. These criteria were written directly into the agent’s decision logic, enabling AI to evaluate ideas not randomly, but using the same formulas Jia relies on in her professional work.

Ignite hidden paths

For the Scriptwriting Agent, she abstracted the narrative structures behind her successful videos—such as the three-part pattern of “counterintuitive hook → relatable detail → emotional release,” or the conflict-choice-resolution format used in dialogue-driven scripts. When generating scripts, the AI automatically applies these narrative skeletons, matching them with real examples of Jia’s natural tone from her TikTok and YouTube Shorts content. The result is a distinctively human voice that remains platform-native.

Her Data & Iteration Agent reflects her more analytical habits. Instead of focusing solely on view count, the AI is instructed to analyze completion rate, click-through behavior, emotional keywords in comments, and the ratio of saves to shares. It identifies whether a video overperformed because of emotional resonance, personal storytelling, or information density, and then recommends revisions based on Jia’s personal optimization strategies—such as increasing narrative tension, simplifying information load, or enhancing the opening hook.

In developing the Business Communication Agent, Jia integrated her real negotiation templates, pricing logic, and brand-communication patterns. The AI can respond to clients based on budget range, content type, usage rights requirements, and campaign goals. It automatically generates emails that are polite yet firm, reflecting the tone of a creator who understands industry standards and content value. For many small business owners, this was the first time they had access to professional-level communication tools.

Venture beyond limits

But the foundation beneath all of these technical components is not AI—it is Jia’s field research workflow, a methodology rare even among established marketing agencies. Before designing any campaign, she personally visits each shop. She observes customer flow, listens to the rhythm of the space, studies how people interact with products, and speaks directly with the owners about their pressures, margins, and hopes. She identifies their bestselling items, frequent customer questions, seasonal challenges, and what makes their business emotionally compelling.

She then conducts market and competitor research, mapping out where the business stands in its local ecosystem and what narrative advantage it holds within its community. These findings become the basis for a fully customized storytelling blueprint, which she later encodes into her AI agents. As a result, the system does not produce generic suggestions. It produces hyper-specific, culturally attuned, context-driven strategies grounded in the shop’s real conditions.

This hybrid methodology—AI systemization built atop human field research—allows her to democratize high-end marketing capabilities that were once accessible only to major agencies. Through her system, small business owners gain multilingual content production, narrative planning, data interpretation, and professional brand communication at a fraction of the cost.

Discover new possibilities

And the results are visible. Shops once dependent on unpredictable foot traffic now appear on travel itineraries. Locals discover hidden cafes through algorithm-driven recommendations. Owners who once feared the camera now create content with confidence. Revenue stabilizes. Opportunities grow. And lives quietly shift.

Jia has heard countless emotional stories. A baker whose shop had a line for the first time. A grocer who no longer wakes up afraid that no customers will come. A mother who stayed awake smiling because strangers online praised her pastries. “When someone is finally seen,” she says, “their destiny begins to loosen.”

Growing up between China and the United States, Jia learned early how easily stories can bridge gaps. A small cultural misunderstanding in high school later became a viral series viewed by millions, teaching her that narratives can dissolve distance. Today, she applies that intuition to help small shops connect across cultures, languages, and backgrounds.

Find your voice

She imagines a future where a back-alley café can reach global travelers, where a single-language nonprofit can inspire donors abroad, and where a family business can speak beyond its street corner. “Influence should be determined by meaning, not money,” she says. “If your story matters, people should hear it.”

From a teenager navigating cultural divides to a creative director building AI-powered storytelling systems, Jia has proven that technology alone cannot democratize influence—people must choose to use it that way. Through empathy, fieldwork, and innovation, she is building a world where visibility is no longer a luxury and where every story, no matter how small, has the chance to be heard.