Jessie Hughes.
Jessie Hughes, Creative Technologist at Leonardo.Ai.
This year’s onslaught of AI-centred Super Bowl commercials tried to convince us that AI will change our lives, yet none of them showed us how. While analytics firm iSpot reported that 23% of all ads featured artificial intelligence, not a single advertiser invited the audience to actually use it. We live in a second-screen era where our phones are practically glued to our palms, and advertisers are sleeping on the most potent engagement tool ever created.
Second-screen programming is now the standard for how football is consumed. Attention moves naturally between the TV and the smartphone as viewers Google stats, place bets, and scroll through socials. The device is already in our hands—it is the primary bridge to the audience. So why didn’t a single AI company ask us to play?
With over a billion downloads, ChatGPT is one of the most ubiquitous apps in the world. Imagine if they had opted for an interactive experience that invited us to engage. Why not turn the Super Bowl into a massive AI-powered trivia game? "Hey ChatGPT, how many chicken wings would fill a football field?" “Do you think I’d make a better Quarterback, Linemen, Receiver, or Defence?” “Explain the rules of that last penalty.” “Show me in a Seahawks jersey.”
I had wrongly predicted that the 2026 Super Bowl would be the landmark year for AI in Marketing.
Coinbase’s legacy Super Bowl QR code commercial—a clever throwback to the bouncing DVD logo—which motivated millions of viewers to pull out their phones to engage, was a tested proof-of-concept for second-screen participation. I anticipated AI to be the next evolution of that experiential spark, tailored engagements that hyped viewers to take out their phones for personalised experiences. AI isn’t special because it speeds up the things we already do; it’s revolutionary because it allows us to do things we otherwise simply cannot.
The brands that actually won the Big Game encouraged play, from Coinbase’s simple karaoke sing-along to Uber Eats welcoming fans to create their own customised Super Bowl commercials. Built using a modular library of footage—featuring stars like Addison Rae and NFL legends Jerry Rice and Sauce Gardner—viewers could generate unique Uber Eats ads. Inviting fan co-creation, Uber Eats didn’t just air one spot; they sparked thousands of organic micro-ads across social media. Similarly, Avocados From Mexico skipped the $8 million TV spot entirely to launch the Prediction Pit. By using an AI avatar of Rob Riggle to provide real-time game data and recipes, they met fans on their second screens with pure utility.
For most advertisers, they treated the Super Bowl like the Oscars—approaching it as a series of high-budget, linear productions featuring A-list talent. In the world's greatest entertainment spectacle, the goal should be active participation, with AI affording the most intimate and customizable entertainment experiences imaginable.
AI did show up at the Super Bowl, but it was predominantly tucked away in the behind-the-scenes of production. We could dissect stats showing that 50% of this year's ads used AI to streamline pitching, testing, and execution, or get excited that a production can now be made for a fraction of the cost, but that still doesn’t unpack AI’s true value, which lies in personalised advertising. This is the Super Bowl. These brands don’t need to make their ads cheaper; they need to make their brand more engaging.
I could get into the technical AI-hybrid workflows of Ro’s Serena Williams campaign, utilising AI-driven pre-production—from pre-vis to camera movement—to optimise the shoot before it even began. We saw Genspark, the AI startup, using its own platform to generate its script. We even saw the uncanny valley pushed to its limits with AI-powered VFX: Xfinity resurrected 1993-era Jeff Goldblum for their Jurassic Park spot, and Dunkin’ used de-aging to give Ben Affleck a 90s sitcom glow-up in Good Will Dunkin. I could comment on the 100% AI-generated spots, like SVEDKA’s choice to lean into stereotyped ‘AI-slop’ robot aesthetics, intentionally, one hopes, which took the vodka brand four months to produce; a shocking time investment given that Kling 3.0 could replicate the results in seconds.
Now these new production workflows are truly impressive, and showcase wide industry AI adoption, but I want to keep us focused on the point: despite having a phone in every hand in America, AI advertisers played by old rules and missed an opportunity to shift from passive viewing into interactive entertainment. The commercials were pretty, and they were funny—but they largely stayed within the familiar language of commercials. AI companies had a shot to define the future of engagement by evidencing real-time, personalised utility.
Instead, both Amazon and Anthropic’s linear ads jested in the trendy anti-AI rhetoric dominating cultural conversation. The strategy seemed to be: name the elephant in the room to disarm it. Amazon’s spot featured Chris Hemsworth satirically calling out the collective paranoia that AI is always listening. Anthropic took a more aggressive swing at OpenAI, teasing a dystopian future of AI-saturated advertising that felt like a warning.
OpenAI soothed qualms with an arthouse, builder-centric vignette: Meta, by contrast, leveraged the legendary Spike Lee, delivering rapid-fire motion. However, for a product marketed as smart glasses for sports, the logic felt untethered from reality, expecting audiences to believe an onboard microphone could pick up a “Hey Meta” through the 70-mph wind noise of a downhill ski run. All were beautiful filmmaking, but the choice for spectacle over participation was impossible to ignore.
Rather than engaging a record 140 million viewers who had ChatGPT in their pockets, these ads felt remarkably chained to the status quo. AI is the future of advertising because it is the future of interaction.
I wasn’t the only one asking my phone to loop me in on Bad Bunny’s lyrics. We are living in a second-screen age where AI is a constant companion, yet advertising is missing the chance for the kind of engagement that lets people intimately immerse themselves, at scale. AI is meant to be used to create the impossible—real-time personalisation, mass participation, and deep immersion. The capability is already here: plug-and-play tools like Leonardo.Ai’s API allow creative advertising to break out of closed-door production entirely.
The future of Super Bowl advertising isn't in the production or even the broadcast—it's in the interactive space between the phone and the fan.
In a divided country with rival teams, the underwhelmed reaction to these ads was a rare moment of national unity. The 2026 Super Bowl will be remembered as the "AI Bowl," with audiences waiting for us to prove why. Advertising is still stuck in the "tell" phase of "show and tell.” Maybe 2027 will be the year they give us something to play with.