AI Took the Super Bowl Stage, But That’s Not the Real Story

This year’s Super Bowl wasn’t just a championship game. It was a signal. Nearly a quarter of the ads, 15 out of 66, featured or focused on artificial intelligence. From OpenAI and Anthropic running direct spots, to brands like Svedka leveraging generative AI in production, AI wasn’t a background tool. It was front and center. For the marketing industry, this represents a watershed moment: when AI went from hype to normalization.

Two Clear Approaches to AI in Advertising

What stood out wasn’t just the volume of AI-related ads, but the way brands approached it. 

1. AI as the Product: Companies like Meta and Oakley showcased AI-powered features as the hero. In these cases, AI was the value proposition.

2. AI as the Production Engine: Other brands used generative AI behind the scenes, speeding up creativity, reducing production costs, and enabling rapid iteration. This is where the real shift is happening. AI is no longer experimental. It’s becoming operational. And as the IAB predicts that roughly one-third of ad creatives will soon involve generative AI, we’re clearly entering a new era of how campaigns are conceived and executed.

3. Advertising within AI: The next frontier isn’t just ads about AI or powered by AI, it’s ads delivered within AI environments. As consumers increasingly interact with AI assistants, chats and generative platforms, these spaces will become new media channels. A new question arises: “How do brands embed themselves authentically within AI interactions?”. The opportunity is massive but so is the responsibility. 

But Here’s the Catch: Presence Doesn’t Equal Impact

Despite AI’s strong presence, many AI-themed ads ranked lower on USA Today’s Ad Meter. Some viewers even reported tech fatigue. That’s important. Because AI alone is not a strategy. And novelty alone doesn’t drive connection. Consumers don’t reward brands for using AI. They reward brands for making them feel something. If AI becomes the headline without enhancing the story, audiences tune out.

The Real Opportunity: Agentic AI in Marketing Operations

At Prodigy, we believe the bigger transformation isn’t AI in front of the camera—it’s AI working behind it. We’re entering the age of agentic AI systems that don’t just generate assets, but actively optimize, learn, and make decisions in real time.  We believe that modern advertising is autonomous optimization across channels, campaigns that evolve and orchestrate based on performance, teams augmented by intelligent systems that scale strategy. That’s where the competitive advantage lives.

From Creative Experiment to Infrastructure Shift

The Super Bowl moment signals something larger than a trend. It signals that AI has moved from, “should we test this?” to “how do we operationalize this responsibly and effectively?”The brands that win in the next 12–24 months won’t be the ones that shout the loudest about AI. They’ll be the ones that use it to optimize their spend, reduce friction, increase creative velocity, and, most importantly, drive measurable growth. The Super Bowl showed us AI has arrived. Now the industry has to decide what to build with it.