Did the Super Bowl Make Americans Like AI Any More?

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, can AI Superbowl ads change what Americans think of AI? Before that end the headlines, the SaaSpocalypse continues. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.

0:21All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Scrunch, Optimizely, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you are interested in sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIDailyBrief.ai. AIDailyBrief.ai is also where you're going to find links to pretty much everything else going on in this ecosystem of projects, new software, new communities, and new initiatives. For those of you who are paying attention to what we were doing over at AIDB New Year's, our 10-week AI New Year's resolution program, we've got something in a similar vein coming, although a little bit different.

1:00I'm not quite ready to share all the details about it, But the gist is, if OpenAI is going to agent-first work by March 31st, my thinking is, why shouldn't the rest of us do the same? You can sign up to get the first information about that at aidbtraining.com, and I'm excited to share what we've got cooking over there. For now, let's talk about the SaaSpocalypse. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. Last week, we talked a little bit about the current state of the markets when it comes to AI. And now a week on from that, the so-called SaaSpocalypse is absolutely taking hold as a major investor narrative.

1:38Last week,$400 billion in market cap was wiped out in software. The iShares software-focused ETF IGV closed last week down 8.7%, compounding a 7.4 % loss the week prior. Despite a rebound of 3.5 % on Friday, the software index is dramatically underperforming the overall S &P 500. At least from a market perspective, the death of software has become the first big AI narrative of the year, and investors are scrambling to make sense of it. Many are rushing to explain that SaaS isn't going anywhere and that the notion that large companies will vibe-code their own software is preposterous. CNBC featured comments from multiple software CEOs who think the narrative is getting way ahead of reality.

2:17Bach's CEO Aaron Levy argued that the narrative, quote, somewhat misunderstands this idea of where companies tend to spend their resources and their time and energy. He claims that companies will keep their SaaS subscriptions and look for agents to build on top of them. In other words, he said that actually could present an opportunity for the SaaS giants to evolve their products with AI. Levy argued that in the 20-year history of cloud software, quote, this is the most exciting moment we've ever had. Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff was singing a similar tune. Salesforce was, of course, early to the agent theme, with Benioff claiming that AgentForce is the fastest-growing product in the history of the company.

2:50He also noted that we've got all the customer data so that moat should remain intact. Still, corporate America is very open to experimentation right now. The Wall Street Journal spoke with Authentic Brands chief digital officer Adam Croningold about how new AI tools are impacting work for the conglomerate that owns Reebok and Champion. Remarking on the newly released Claude plugin for legal work, which caused one leg down in that big dip last week, Croningold said the company already has software to handle contract review, but, he added, everyone feels very empowered to raise their hand and say, hey, how can we fold this in?

3:21You get the impression reading the piece that when it comes to customers, there is a feeling that the friction for experimentation has dropped meaningfully. Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital offered an explanation for the dramatic drop in software stocks even if you don't believe that SaaS is doomed. Software has been the best-performing sector of the S &P for the past two decades, on the back of extremely strong growth. Gerstner argued that forward growth rates are far less clear. Software had been valued at 30 to 35x profit, implying a long-horizon view that SaaS had multiple decades of overperformance.

3:51If AI contracts that horizon to a single decade, that dramatically changes the trajectory for these companies. As Brad put it, AI disruption lowers predictability of future cash flows. Buko Capital summed it up, say it with me, we only buy accelerating top lines. Staying on the more nuanced argument theme, one also doesn't have to believe that SaaS companies are empirically doomed to understand that the traditional seat model is looking less and less viable. First of all, even if they keep the seat model, if companies are slashing their headcount, SaaS can't sell as many seats. Eric Goldhar writes, We used to buy software for humans to use.

4:25Now we buy agents to do the work. If your product charges by the user, you're selling a tax on productivity. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked in an interview, is software dead? He somewhat obliquely got at this idea that the fundamental business model of software has changed, saying every company is now an API company whether they want to be or not. This is most certainly going to be the theme that defines at least the next week in markets, so one will be watching closely. Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters has said that AI is delivering tangible benefits for the legacy legal research firm. The company was one of the hardest hit from last week's release of the legal plugin for Claude Cowork.

5:01Their stock fell 20 % just last week. And despite Thomson Reuters aggressively having added AI features across their product suite, it seems that the market doesn't put too much stock in that. In spite of that, though, CEO Steve Hasker told investors during last week's earnings call, we are seeing tangible benefits from our continued investments in AI. This year, they plan to scale up agentic features within the platform in a bid to keep up with offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. Interestingly, their financials were a perfect demonstration that strong results in the present aren't enough for investors.

5:31Thomson Reuters reported 7 % revenue growth and 9 % growth in EBITDA profits, with margin increasing to 44.3%. percent. Both the AI features in their platforms and content licensing contributed meaningfully to the bottom line. Still, investors are concerned that legacy software platforms will face inevitable disruption from the AI startups. Morningstar maintained their fair value level on the stock, suggesting it's now massively oversold, while Morgan Stanley slashed their price target by a third. Writes Finimize, the big question is shifting from will legal gen AI sell to whether pricing power and renewals hold up as lookalike features spread.

6:04When that uncertainty rises, valuation multiples often compress across the software group, even for strong incumbents. Microsoft was another one of the big losers of the software wipeout last week, but they could be positioned for a comeback as agent strategies take hold. The stock lost 6.7%, losing$218 billion in market cap. Now, unlike most of the software stocks, Microsoft faces dual headwinds. In addition to the cracks that are forming in their SaaS business model, Microsoft is also lagging behind the other hyperscalers in their cloud business. Last week's slide and growing competition from the startup labs was enough to trigger a response from Microsoft's top sales executive.

6:39According to the information, commercial CEO Judson Althoff circulated a memo to sales staff explaining how the company was positioned relative to OpenAI's new Frontier product. The memo provided talking points for selling Microsoft's agent management platform, including specific advantages the product has over OpenAI's new platform. Primarily, sales representatives were told to emphasize Microsoft's edge in agent security and compliance. Now, we've been hearing a lot of chatter recently out of Microsoft surrounding the latest agents launched by the Frontier Startup Labs. Two weeks ago, for example, the Information reported that executives were planning their response to clawed code.

7:11This included CEO Satya Nadella discussing his experimentation with the product as well as setting up OpenClaw and encouraging employees to play with the new tools. Nadella was said to be looking for ways to incorporate the latest agentic features into GitHub and other Microsoft platforms. Now, it's clear that Microsoft is feeling the pressure to keep up and are making a bet that they need to keep agent security at the center of their sales pitch. Which brings us to our final story for today. Speaking of OpenClaw and security, OpenClaw is partnering with VirusTotal to clean up the skills library.

7:42Last week, security researchers revealed that skills published to OpenClaw's ClawHub were a cesspit of malware. An audit found that around 400 skills included malicious code. These included some of the most popular like LinkedIn Job Application and YouTube Thumbnail Grabber. Now, OpenClaw has partnered with VirusTotal to scan every skill uploaded to their platform and verify their malware free. A blog post announcing the initiative reinforced that this won't be a silver bullet. Writes OpenClaw, VirusTotal scanning won't catch everything. A skill that uses natural language to instruct an agent to do something malicious won't trigger a virus signature.

8:14A carefully crafted prompt injection payload won't show up in a threat database. However, they hope the scanning will detect known exploits and suspicious code. One thing that I am quite sure of, after having fully gone non-technical builder in the last couple of months, is that security engineers are going to be more in demand than just about anyone I can imagine. If that's the skill set you have, goodness gracious, is this going to be a good year. For now, that's going to do it for the headlines. Next up, the main episode.

8:46Hello friends, if you've been enjoying what we've been discussing on the show, you'll want to check out another podcast that I have had the privilege to host, which is called You Can With AI from KPMG. Season one was designed to be a set of real stories from real leaders making AI work in their organizations. And now season two is coming and we're back with even bigger conversations. This show is entirely focused on what it's like to actually drive AI change inside your enterprise and has case studies, expert panels, and a lot more practical goodness that I hope will be extremely valuable for you as the listener.

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11:53Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today we are talking about the AI ads in the Super Bowl, but the reason that this is deserving of an entire main episode is that ultimately, this isn't really a show about advertising. Instead, it is a show about public perception and what, if anything, this advertising did to change that. The context coming in is a fairly significant antipathy among the average Americans towards AI. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a piece called Why Do Americans Hate AI? And unfortunately, this isn't just media bluster. To run through just some of the recent statistics around American perceptions of AI, according to an Edelman study, only 32 % trust it.

12:30A Pew study found 59 % have little or no confidence that companies will develop AI responsibly. Also from Pew, 52 % are more concerned than excited about AI versus only 10 % who are more excited than concerned. Gallup found that 73 % expect AI will cause net job loss. And Searchlight found that 51 % think AI will replace, not supplement human work. That of course sets up these Super Bowl ads for a very different task than other advertisers. The Washington Post got at this question with their piece, can these Super Bowl ads make Americans love something that they don't like? Now, of course, there was always going to be some portion of people who are going to write this off as the latest example of a bubble and not actually spend any time engaging with this at all.

13:11However, I continue to believe that while Americans are at this point negatively inclined towards AI, for the vast majority, this is not some hardened principled position. This is people rightly understanding that these tools are powerful, and indeed powerful enough that there could be negative implications that they're not sure about. They're commenting from a place of larger economic anxiety that isn't just about AI, but which AI feeds into. They're being asked in a divisive landscape that wants extreme opinions, and one which tends to drown out the vast majority of middle voices who are just trying to figure things out.

13:43So the question is, how did these ads do with that set of middle voices? Not the people determined to hate AI and not the people who were already sold on it, but the group which I consider are the vast majority who are still trying to figure out what it's going to mean for them. By Adweek's calculations, 23 % of the ads were either for AI companies or highlighted the way that they used AI in their production. So let's go through and see how some of them did and what they might have meant for these broader perception issues. Let's follow up first on Anthropic, given that we covered it last week.

14:13Summarizing my points for those of you who missed that rant, the ads for those of you who didn't see it all start with someone using AI to get advice about something that they're trying to achieve or something that they're trying to do, which starts benign enough, but eventually turns into a sales pitch for some product. The tagline, at least the one that was released last week on social, was ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude. This was, of course, a swipe at OpenAI, who had announced that ads were coming to ChatGVT. Like everyone else, I thought that the ads were well done and that they were funny, if you have the proper context.

14:44My critiques of them were two-part. First, from an effective advertising perspective, While these killed on social for people who were enfranchised enough to actually know that OpenAI had announced that ads were coming, I thought that they were going to be incredibly confusing for the average person who had no idea. It would be different if for the last three months people had been complaining about ads in ChatGPT, but that's just not the case. Which led to my second complaint. Because people wouldn't have that context, it felt to me like the vast majority of people who did enjoy this were going to be those who interpreted it as a critique of AI in general.

15:16Think about what the ad says if you don't know that it's trying to go after ChachiBT. It's people with genuine concerns and challenges in their life, vulnerably turning to AI, only for it to turn around and try to sell you something. The point it's making then, at least to that perception, reinforces the idea that AI is just the latest thing from tech billionaires to separate you from your money and time. So how did they land? The short answer is not that well. From Adweek, early audience response suggests the message struggled to land. According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ad's likability score placed it in the bottom 3 % compared with Super Bowl ads over the past five years.

15:52Its top two box purchase intent scored 24 % below Super Bowl norms and 19 % below ads in its category that aired over the last 90 days. Viewers most commonly describe their reactions as WTF, signaling confusion around both the message and the execution. So there you have it. Ligability in the bottom 3 % compared with Super Bowl ads over the last five years is not something to be proud of. Now, one cool thing from Claude was that they added live sports scores and stats into the app. Now, this is the type of feature that 100 % is not for me, but to the extent that you are trying to turn your chatbot into a portal to connect to the rest of the internet, this for some users could be really valuable.

16:29Rob Haysfield said, wait, why didn't Anthropic put this in their Super Bowl ad? Tech publication TVPN tried to have some fun with it, running a spoof where they offered Claude with ads. Now, we also talked last week about how OpenAI had bit back pretty hard on social, calling Anthropics ad all sorts of dishonest, but they hadn't yet revealed their Super Bowl ad. The tagline of this ad was, you can just build things. The ad focuses on the hands of the subject and has a bunch of smash cuts to short vignettes of people doing stuff, making a marble track, building electronics, answering in class, installing Linux, creating a pigment for painting, playing chess, working on robotics.

17:02Getting their Apple on, they flash through luminary geniuses like Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, and Albert Einstein. The ad was not just Codex coded, it was Codex branded. OpenAI CMO Kate Roush wrote, We're living through a time when people can build things that were previously out of reach. The message is around participation, agency, and leaning in to use these tools to do things you just couldn't before. Reinforcing the reframe that we've been living through and documenting on this show, she added, Now AI is not only answering your questions, but is going to do things on your behalf. Roush described Codex as a sign of material change underway in the industry.

17:35Now the funny thing is, I think that if you had shown AI people this ad a couple of months ago without the ending, a majority of them would have bet it was for Claude Code rather than for Codex. But that's not where it landed and so the question is, how did people receive it? AdAge basically said it was OpenAI trying to position ChatGPT as the Kleenex of AI. In other words, ChatGPT just being synonymous with AI, so taking advantage of the brand positioning they already had, to make kind of a more highfalutin ad. Generally the response I saw to it was fairly positive if benign. I saw it on some lists as the top-ranked of the AI ads, although I think the highest placement I saw was maybe the New York Times list had it at 17th best out of the total 66.

18:13For others, it was fine but forgettable, but ultimately a positive vision of the future. Now, one crazy wrinkle on everything was that after the ad came out, this post popped up on Reddit that was purportedly from a disaffected OpenAI staffer who said that this ad was actually a last-minute replacement for an ad that would have teased OpenAI's device. At first, they showed just a screenshot of what looked like Alexander Skarsgård looking at a weird tabular thing, and then a few minutes later, an entire 30-second ad appeared. It indeed appeared to be Alexander Skarsgård with some weird chrome ear things, pressing a shiny chrome device and looking confusingly at it.

18:49Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian said, the ad is beautiful, they should have run this one. But apparently it was all just an elaborate hoax. The Verge writes, whoever was behind this hoax had been working on it for some time, an approach spreading their story on multiple fronts. Analyst Max Weinbach got messages about it a couple of weeks ago. An Ad Age reporter, Jillian Follett, wrote, A fake headline is circulating on X that falsely claims to be my reporting. I did not write that story, and neither I nor Ad Age has published a piece saying OpenAI changed its Super Bowl ad. OpenAI CMO Kate Roche again responded, Fake headline an entire fake website claiming we changed our Super Bowl ad at the last minute.

19:23Someone going to a lot of trouble. Honestly, I do not know what to make of this one, and what the incentive for someone to create this entire ad and backing campaign was. Maybe we'll learn over time, but for now, just a weird wrinkle in this overall story. Moving on, Microsoft and Meta both tried to tailor their AI pitch to the sports crowd. Microsoft's ad actually wasn't specifically produced for the Super Bowl, but was part of a larger campaign around Copilot. And it's an ad all about how Copilot helped NFL teams and players make better decisions through its ability to process lots of data. Fairly unremarkable, but at least unbranded with the setting, Meta's ad focused on the Oakley version of their smart glasses.

20:00It opens on Marshawn Lynch asking the AI to play his Beast Mode playlist, then progresses through a series of users making other requests of the assistant that included Spike Lee and streamer iShowSpeed. Interestingly, Fortune suggested that this ad wasn't really aimed at the consumer. Kimberly Whitler, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, said, They're not just communicating to consumers, they're also communicating to investors who watch these ads. They're reinforcing this kind of view that the company is very innovative. I don't know, man. I think that Meta has recognized that although certain parts of their AI strategy haven't gone so well, they are in a unique position when it comes to these wearables, and that there's a lot of use cases for AI glasses, like the ones they show here, where the glasses just do things for you as you're living your life at high speed, that might appeal to regular people.

20:43I think the ad does a good job playing to Meta's strengths in this area and fitting in with the larger Super Bowl vibe. Now, the AI ad that had the most acclaim was the ad from Google focusing on Gemini. In it, it shows a mom and a son getting excited about their new house. They're taking images of the raw potential and imagining what it could be in the future thanks to the help of Gemini. Google is historically one of the few Super Bowl advertisers that's actually daring enough to try to move out of the tried-and-true patterns of funny to pull on the heartstrings, and they've gotten pretty good at it.

21:13It's a sweet ad, and I guarantee that if you're a parent, it would have made you feel something. because the point is it's not really about AI. It's about how AI can be a part of the crazy journey of life. Artificial Nightmares wrote, Google really killed it with their Super Bowl ad. Clear, concise, human, and it instantly showed you the value of their product and why you need it with a real world example. Every's Dan Shipper wrote, Low-key, Google had the best AI Super Bowl commercial for consumers, actually good at pitching the product and explaining why you might use it. Now, one company that went in the exact opposite direction and decided to play on and simultaneously validate and also normalize and make fun of fears of AI taking over was Amazon's Alexa ad with Chris Hemsworth.

21:52In it, Chris Hemsworth comes in to see a new Alexa Plus in his house, only to freak out and describe all the ways that it might try to kill him, which are then, of course, hilariously documented in the rest of the ad. Android on Twitter writes, Honestly, brilliant marketing. Everyone else is trying to sound safe and serious. Amazon just goes, we know what you're thinking. Now, my guess is this one is going to be pretty divisive, with some people not appreciating Amazon making light of a fear that actual people have. but I think running all the way in this opposite direction is actually a strategy with some merits and opened up a lot of really funny territory for them.

22:23Now what's interesting is that it wasn't just the big guys running ads as well. GenSpark apparently decided around Christmas to do an ad, and their agency put it together, of course with the help of AI, in just five weeks. The ad featured historic slacker Matthew Broderick subtly making a nod to his Ferris Bueller character, walking through an office, and explaining how GenSpark could give everyone the day off. It makes slides, it does some Excel work, with the idea to make clear AI's time-saving benefits. I saw a couple reputable lists, think it was the most effective of the AI ads, but there were also a lot of people who felt like Stephen Breach on Twitter who wrote, this is pretty much telling our employers they don't need us anymore?