ai.com Super Bowl ad sparks traffic surge and backlash

A mysterious 30-second Super Bowl advert sent millions of curious viewers to ai.com’s website on Sunday night, but what was meant to be an $85 million triumphant product announcement soon turned sour. 

The most engaging ad of the night quickly turned into a wave of complaints as millions of users battled with gateway timeouts, endless loading screens, and many unanswered questions.

ai.com stokes curiosity with Super Bowl ad

ai.com’s 30-second fourth-quarter spot generated up to 9.1x more engagement than the average Super Bowl LX ad, enabling it to top all other brands in EDO’s annual TV outcomes ranking of all Super Bowl ads, which was released on Monday. 

However, that same ad was considered “ineffective” by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, primarily because it failed to clearly communicate the value of ai.com’s new product to viewers.

The fourth-quarter ad showed three usernames (@mark, @sam, and @elon), which were accompanied by motion graphic visuals and an abstract tagline, “AGI is coming”, which offered little to no details about what the platform was or what it actually offers. 

Using the element of mystery was definitely effective, as the ad gained the top spot in engagement rankings by EDO (a TV outcomes company), outperforming even the Super Bowl ad by 9.1 times, according to their analysis. 

While ai.com was successfully able to drive curious viewers to their website, that initial wave of anticipation, excitement and curiosity was quickly replaced by other emotions.

AGI is coming? When? Where? How?

ai.com’s “AGI is coming” ad left viewers with more questions than answers. As millions of viewers brought out their phones during the break to reserve their handles, most were greeted with error screens and slow loading times due to the wave of traffic the website had to handle. 

According to ai.com, their platform offers “autonomous AI agents” that can work, send messages, execute actions across apps, and even trade stocks on their users’ behalf. 

The CEO, Kris Marszalek, explained his vision as “a decentralized network of billions of agents who self-improve and share these improvements with each other, vastly and rapidly expanding agentic capabilities and accelerating the advent of AGI.” 

However, for the everyday viewer that’s unfamiliar with AI terms, the Super Bowl ad offered little to no context about what they were actually signing up for, leaving them more confused than excited.

“Right now, it’s more of a promise than a product,” said Jamey Tucker, a consumer technology reporter, in his latest analysis for WRDW. “The platform is not fully live yet. There’s no finished product most people can actually use today.”

Will the public lose patience with ai.com?

Less than an hour after the ad aired, users had already taken to social media with complaints about the error messages, gateway timeouts, and site outages. 

Yesterday, as complaints increased, Marszalek responded on X: “Insane traffic levels. We prepared for scale, but not for THIS.” He later attributed the disruption to external factors outside the company’s control.

For users who eventually got through the initial hurdles, the experience still fell short of what was hinted at. The website requires a credit card to prove users are human, but the actual AI agent functionality is still unavailable. 

As of now, users can only reserve two handles- one for themselves and another for their future AI assistant, but there is still no active product for use yet.

Questions over product readiness despite massive spending

Several eyebrows are now being raised at the technical difficulties that occurred despite the scale of investment behind the campaign/launch. With Marszalek buying the ai.com domain name for $70 million (in cryptocurrency, the highest domain sale in history), combined with an estimated $8-10 million for the Super Bowl ad slot in particular and production costs, the total investment could reach somewhere close to $85 million.

“Tech companies often use massive moments like the Super Bowl to create fear of missing out, and to encourage people to act first and ask questions later,” according to WRDW’s analysis. “That sense of urgency many viewers felt during the commercial was intentional.”

Generating hype before product completion isn’t new to tech spaces, but the scale of ai.com’s investment, combined with the subsequent infrastructure issues has fueled skepticism. The platform was eventually restored, so users are still able to complete registrations and reserve their handles. 

However, first impressions go a long way especially in tech, and now the public is wondering whether the product is truly ready for mainstream adoption, or if they’re being carried away by the hype of a vision still under construction.

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