The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Did the Super Bowl Make Americans Like AI Any More?
Episode Date: February 9, 2026A look at whether this year’s Super Bowl ads from OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic, and a wave of smaller AI startups actually shifted public perception of AI, or just reinforced e...xisting fears and hype. Drawing on audience reaction data, ad rankings, and the broader context of American skepticism toward AI, this episode breaks down which spots connected, which backfired, and why advertising AI is fundamentally different from advertising soda or trucks. In the headlines: the SaaS selloff deepens, software valuations compress, and investors grapple with what the agent era means for legacy tech Brought to you by:KPMG – Discover how AI is transforming possibility into reality. Tune into the new KPMG 'You Can with AI' podcast and unlock insights that will inform smarter decisions inside your enterprise. Listen now and start shaping your future with every episode. https://www.kpmg.us/AIpodcastsRackspace Technology - Build, test and scale intelligent workloads faster with Rackspace AI Launchpad - http://rackspace.com/ailaunchpadZencoder - From vibe coding to AI-first engineering - http://zencoder.ai/zenflowOptimizely Agents in Action - Join the virtual event (with me!) free March 4 - https://www.optimizely.com/insights/agents-in-action/AssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - https://www.assemblyai.com/briefSection - Build an AI workforce at scale - https://www.sectionai.com/LandfallIP - AI to Navigate the Patent Process - https://landfallip.com/Robots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results https://robotsandpencils.com/The Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Interested in sponsoring the show? sponsors@aidailybrief.ai
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, can AI Super Bowl ads change what Americans think of AI?
Before that in the headlines, the SaaSpocalypse continues.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in.
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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.
I'm not quite ready to share all the details about it, but the gist is, if open a new year,
in AI 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 Reef 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. Last week, $400 billion in market cap was wiped out in software.
The I-share software-focused ETF IGV closed last week down 8.7%, compounding a 7.4% lost 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. Box 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 says,
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 Beniof was singing a similar tune. Salesforce was, of course,
early to the agent theme, with Benioff claiming that Agent Force is the fastest growing product
in the history of the company. He 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 Brand's 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 Plug-in 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?
You 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 Gersner 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. Gersner 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. If 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.
Bucco 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.
Now 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, Thompson 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
plug-in for Claude Co-work. Their stock fell 20% just last week. And despite Thompson 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 Open
AI. Interestingly, their financials were a perfect demonstration that strong results in the present
aren't enough for investors. Thompson Reuters reported 7% revenue growth and 9% growth in EBITDA profits,
with margin increasing to 44.3%. 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.
Wrights Phnomize, the big question is shifting from will legal Gen AISL to whether pricing
power and renewals hold up as look-alike features spread? When 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 percent, losing
using $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.
According to the information, commercial CEO Judson Altoff 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 Claude Code.
This 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 OpenClawe and security, OpenClawe is partnering
with Virus Total to clean up the Skills Library. Last week, security researchers revealed that
skills published to OpenClawnCla's Claw Hub 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 Virus Total 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, virus total 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.
A carefully crafted prompt injection payload won't show up in a threat date.
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 a 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.
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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. A 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. However, 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.
So 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 are already sold on it,
but the group which I consider the vast majority who are still trying to figure out
what it's going to mean for them.
By Ad Week's calculations, 23% of the ads were either four 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 Anthropics.
given that we covered it last week.
Summarizing 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 chat chiv-t.
Like everyone else, I thought that the ads were well done
and that they were funny. If you have the proper context. My 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 have been complaining about ads in chat GPT, but that's just
not the case. Which led to my second complaint. Because people wouldn't have that context, it felt to
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. Think about what the ad says if you don't know that it's trying
to go after chat CBT. 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 Ad Week, early audience response suggests the message struggled to land.
According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ads likeability score placed it in the bottom
3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the past five years.
Its 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.
Likeability 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.
Rob Hayesfield said, wait, why didn't Anthropic put this in their Super Bowl ad?
Tech publication TBPN 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. Getting their Appleon, they flash through luminary geniuses
like Alan Turing, Grace Hopper, and Albert Einstein. The appellant,
was not just Codex coded, it was Codex branded. OpenAI CMO Kate Rausch 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. Reenforcing the reframe that we've been living through and
documenting on the 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. Now, the funny thing is, I think that if you're not a lot of the
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 CodeCode rather than for Codex. But that's not where it landed, and so the
question is, how did people receive it? Ad Age basically said it was OpenAI trying to position
chatGBT as the Kleenex of AI. In other words, chat CBT 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. For 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
open AI 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
Scarsgard looking at a weird tabular thing. And then a few minutes later, an entire 30-second ad appeared.
It indeed appeared to be Alexander Scarsgard with some weird chrome ear things, pressing a shiny
chrome device and looking confusedly at it. Reddit founder Alexis O'Hanian 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,
and approached spreading their story on multiple fronts. Analyst Max Weinbach got messages about it a
couple of weeks ago. An adage 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 Adage 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. Someone 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 co-pilot helped NFL teams and players
make better decisions through its ability to process lots of data. Fairly unremarkable, but at least
on brand with the setting, Meta's ad focused on the Oakley version of their smart glasses. It opens
on Marshawn Lynch asking the AI to play his Beast Mode playlist, then progresses through the
a series of users making other requests of the assistant that included Spike Lee and streamer
I Show Speed. 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.
I think the ad does a good job playing to meta-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.
It'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.
In 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.
Now, what's interesting is that it wasn't just the big guys running ads as well.
Jen Spark 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 Jen Spark 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 are 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, question mark, question mark, question
mark. The Jen Spark social account responded, saying, get the concern, but it's actually the opposite.
AI doesn't replace us, it handles the grunt work so we can focus on the creative, strategic stuff that actually matters.
Even better, it gives us time to build something of our own. That's the future we're excited about.
Stephen, for his part, wasn't buying it, saying, this sounds like the AI response.
Now, vibe coding toolbase 44 now part of Wix, came at the same theme of you can just build stuff that OpenAI did,
but in a much more direct way.
In their ad, they show people in an office discovering delightedly
that they can build apps that weren't possible before.
For my money, this was easily the most underrated of the AI ads.
First of all, unlike the Gen Spark ad,
it's not showing AI doing people's core work.
It's showing how they can have new capabilities that weren't possible before.
In that way, it's inherently empowering.
Second, the ad is just straight funny.
The stuff that they build creates a lot of room for humor.
The tagline, it's app to you, lands.
And I just think it was an actually good source.
spot. Now, we're getting along, but there are just two more that we need to talk about. The first
is from Svedka, who proudly declared that they had made the first fully AI-generated Super Bowl ad
ever, and people were not super impressed, to put it mildly. The ad features, honestly the only
way to put it is horror movie robots, chugging Svedka, dancing at a rave, with the tagline,
shake your bots off. AI filmmaker PJ Ace wrote, I would not be proud of this, lull. In fairness,
we're talking about it, but God, it sucks. That, I think, is fairly
consensus view, so I'll just move on, to our last spot, which is from AI.com. Now, AI.com didn't exist
until very recently. The origin story is that the founder of Crypto.com spent $70 million
to buy the domain, making it, I believe, the most expensive domain purchase of all time.
The ad sent people to AI.com to claim their handle and launch their own AI assistant,
which enough people did that it crashed their website. This was the icing on the bubble cake.
Michael Podluski writes,
crypto guys, no AI background, buy AI.com for 70 million, burn 10 million on a Super Bowl ad,
slogan accelerating the arrival of AGI, ask you for a credit card right away just to claim a
handle, website looks like a cheap five-coded mess, crashes instantly with a 504 gateway timeout.
This looks like the absolute peak of the AI bubble. And fine may be so, but the part that I
most took notice of was this line. Turns out it's just a thin open claw wrapper. And indeed,
founder and CEO Chris on Twitter, in his post, AI.com is now live in beta, writes,
AI.com is the world's first easy to use and secure implementation of OpenClaw, the open source
agent framework that went viral two weeks ago. We made it easy to use without any technical
skills while hardening security to keep your data safe. Even in a world that moves fast, the fact
that OpenClaw went from non-existent to part of a Super Bowl ad in three weeks has got to be
some kind of record. So ultimately, could the
these Super Bowl ads make Americans love something they don't like? Honestly, I'm not really sure.
There were highlights and low lights, but I guess overall it could have been a lot worse,
so maybe we'll call that a win. For now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief.
Appreciate you listening or watching as always. Until next time, peace.
