Scaling affiliate programs with automation and AI, with Margarita Prokopchik of Affise

As affiliate programs scale, manual monitoring becomes the bottleneck. The question for program owners and media buying teams is which technology removes that load and which only carries an AI label. The Affiliate Marketing Podcast host speaks with Margarita Prokopchik, Chief Business Development Officer at Affise, who has been at the company seven years.

In this episode

• Prokopchik names two big shifts: media buyers went from solo entrepreneurs to companies with hundreds of staff (4:13), and tracking moved from pixel and postback to server-to-server and API (5:35).

• She thinks there is "a lot of AI washing" and advises asking what data a vendor's AI uses and whether it can take actions or only generate summaries (6:51, 8:45).

• Rather than forcing one built-in assistant, Affise introduced an MCP server so customers can connect their own AI assistants (12:26).

• She describes a mobile measurement partner as "the source of facts and truth" for mobile marketing, and says gaming has traditionally been its biggest adopter (14:14).

• Some customers have asked to deactivate or replace affiliate manager accounts within months of creating them, which she links to the pressure of the role (19:01).

• iGaming company Alfaleads built a customisable alert system on the Affise API, and she says the trend now is Telegram integration; Affise's own research found its automation cuts up to 30% of an affiliate manager's working time (31:53, 32:33, 33:01).

Episode from The Affiliate Marketing Podcast by Affiverse, published on YouTube.