The Super Bowl, which was broadcast in 190 countries around the world Sunday (Feb. 11), was more than just an overtime battle between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers.
It was also an opportunity for artificial intelligence system providers and developers to highlight the technology, as well as promote its integration across a variety of use cases.
Super Bowl commercials have long been held as the pinnacle of promotion, with spots for this year’s matchup costing firms $7 million.
AI was everywhere during the big game in Las Vegas, with tech giants and AI pioneers from Microsoft and Google to eCommerce marketplace Etsy and cybersecurity company CrowdStrike using their spots to showcase the impact of AI in delivering products and services. The Minions movie franchise and sports drink BodyArmor both chose to parody AI-generated content and deepfakes.
Even singer and entertainer Beyoncé jokingly teased her own AI, a system called Beyoncé-I, during a spot promoting Verizon’s 5G network, while performing next to an AI-generated body double.
The tone and tenor of the ads offer a crystal ball into where AI’s winning implementations are right now, both for internal functions and external ones, as well as what’s to come as firms continue building out AI systems.
The positioning an innovation takes can tell you a lot about it. If Sunday’s multimillion-dollar ad spots are to be believed, AI firms are set on influencing and improving many facets of daily life and commerce.
Read also: AI Copilots Usher in the Service-as-Software Era
The contrast in Super Bowl marketing strategies and overall hype couldn’t be more stark between the buzziest disruption of yesteryear, cryptocurrencies, and the approach taken by today’s AI firms.
Cryptocurrency firms — including the now-defunct FTX exchange — turned to a harem of celebrities for 2022’s Super Bowl, including Matt Damon, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Snoop Dogg, Shaq, Larry David and many more to capture the discretionary income and investment dreams of a mainstream audience. However, the ads spent little time touching on crypto’s actual utility outside of serving as a kind of digital lottery ticket.
In contrast, this year’s AI ads almost exclusively focused on the tech’s real-world applications in making daily life better and more accessible — even if they were at times a bit editorialized.
Cybersecurity company CrowdStrike used its ad spot to showcase how AI can be used to better protect against cyberfraud and bad actors, securing digital endpoints, cloud workloads, identities and data. In the ad, Charlotte, CrowdStrike’s generative AI-powered security assistant, defends a futuristic Western town against a “breach” by a team of hacker bandits.
According to the PYMNTS Intelligence study “Financial Institutions Revamping Technologies to Fight Financial Crimes,” nearly 43% of financial institutions in the United States experienced an increase in fraud in 2023 relative to 2022, resulting in a rise in fraud losses increasing by about 65% from $2.3 million in 2022 to $3.8 million in 2023.
Rather than focusing on AI’s use cases, Google for its ad spot chose to promote how AI updates the features of its Pixel 8 mobile device — particularly how it can help a vision-impaired individual take photos.
The ad spot highlighted Google’s AI-powered accessibility feature, with an AI assistant alerting the visually impaired consumer about when and where other faces were when taking a selfie, resulting in better-captured pictures with family and friends.
See also: Retailers Hope AR and GenAI Energize Consumers and Get Them to Buy
Etsy used its ad spot to promote how AI can supercharge the commerce experience and help consumers with their decision-making, imagining the U.S. turning to Etsy’s AI-powered search to help find a gift for France after receiving the Statue of Liberty.
“With generative AI, you can now talk to computers,” Doriel Abrahams, head of risk, U.S. and principal technologist at Forter, told PYMNTS in an interview posted Feb. 1. “We have become less active, and the computers are now going to work for us.”
Abrahams’ sentiment was the same being amplified with Microsoft’s Super Bowl ad, which promoted the company’s AI Copilot as a life-goal companion.
The ad was Microsoft’s first Super Bowl spot in years and showed people turning to Microsoft’s AI to help them complete their movie, design and code their video game, and study for a chemistry test.
As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote Monday (Feb. 12): “It is said that the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day… Nearly three-quarters of executives surveyed recently said the number of business decisions they make daily has increased 10X over the last three years; 59% said they don’t feel confident making at least one of them.
By helping with these decisions and creating a go-forward framework, AI tools can improve the daily lives of business leaders and consumers alike by streamlining workflows. And given the realities of today’s modern existence, there’s no bigger touchdown than saving time.
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