Bad Bunny’s halftime show aside, AI companies stole the spotlight on Super Bowl Sunday.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Salesforce, Meta, Amazon-owned Ring and a smaller company called Genspark.ai all used Super Bowl spots to promote their products as AI tools meant to help boost productivity and inspiration – rather than replace, annoy or deceive.
“A lot of AI companies see the Super Bowl as an opportunity to connect with consumers and build awareness about their platforms,” Andrew Frank, VP and distinguished analyst at research firm Gartner, told me ahead of the weekend.
For AI companies, Frank said, the mission now is to shift the narrative away from artificial intelligence as “something fake and sloppy” to AI as “something that can help people connect on an emotional level.” They’re trying to achieve this by emphasizing the human aspects of AI, a theme Frank calls “AI humanism.”
But the concept of “AI humanism” doesn’t include ads in AI chatbots, at least according to Anthropic, which made its Super Bowl debut with two spots appearing to roast OpenAI for its recent decision to launch ads.
Both of Anthropic’s two commercials mock the idea of running ads in chatbots or similar products that claim to offer genuine advice in moments of vulnerability.
One ad shows a man asking a therapist, a thinly veiled stand-in for ChatGPT, for advice about how to better communicate with his mother, to which the “therapist” recommends a dating site for finding older women. The other spot depicts a young man asking a personal trainer, again evoking ChatGPT, to create a personalized workout plan based on his height and weight. The “trainer” then recommends an insole for “short kings.”
Both commercials end with the tagline, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.”
Putting aside the irony of running ads about not running ads, it’s worth noting that Anthropic is far from the first company to center its brand identity on its lack of ads. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was previously very vocal about ChatGPT remaining an ad-free service. In 2024, he referred to the idea of ads in AI as “uniquely unsettling,” adding that they should be a “last resort” as a business model.
But, eventually, OpenAI gave into the temptation.
It remains to be seen how long Anthropic will keep its promise not to bring ads into Claude AI. In the shorter term, though, AI companies must keep working to persuade consumers that their products are empowering rather than intrusive.
Part of building trust involves convincing people that AI will help them be productive, not render them obsolete. Beyond the Anthropic-OpenAI spat, that theme came across loud and clear in many of the commercials for AI companies on Sunday.
Overall, AI companies “are trying to convey a message that AI can be authentic and meaningful – and it’s not just AI slop,” Frank said.
AI-powered workspace startup Genspark.ai, for example, ran its first Super Bowl spot, which showed several office employees using its tech to quickly finish tasks, like filling out spreadsheets and finishing slide decks. This productivity boost allowed them to clock out early, tying into the ad’s tagline calling Genspark “the AI for work.”
Salesforce also ran an ad for Slackbot, the AI product built into its workplace productivity tool Slack. In the ad, MrBeast calls Slackbot the “powerful new AI from Salesforce” that consumers can use for help answering difficult questions or “deciphering puzzles.”
But here’s a puzzle that AI can’t necessarily answer: Are ads in AI appropriate?
Do you have any thoughts or tips? Let me know what you think. Hit me up at alyssa@adexchanger.com.
