Why Is Every AI Super Bowl Ad Asking for Permission?

The robots are dancing and nobody's wondering why

Svedka’s Super Bowl spot features AI-powered robots doing choreography. Salesforce handed its entire creative strategy to MrBeast, borrowing his audience’s trust because enterprise software can’t seem to build its own. OpenAI is back for round two, still workshopping how to make a large language model feel like sharing a beer with a friend.

Every AI ad at Super Bowl 60 carries the same subtext: “Please don’t be scared of AI.”

This is fear management, costing $8 million per 30 seconds.

In fairness, the anxiety is real. The larger AI discourse is fraught with fears over job displacement. Nobody seems to understand algorithmic decision-making, and plenty of folks are unsettled by personalization that’s gone from helpful to intrusive, repeatedly serving ads for a product they merely thought about.

The technology is making great strides, but the general public’s comfort with it still lags. The companies building these tools can see this divide widening in every piece of consumer research they commission. So they’re doing what nervous brands do when faced with an apprehensive audience. They’re asking for permission to exist in people’s lives.

Where That Strategy Falls Apart

Svedka made the robots dance because dancing robots are fun robots. Party robots. Not the dispassionate bots that decide whether you qualify for a mortgage. Google scattered regional spots across the country, each one attaching a human face to the technology, real small business owners, applications and results. The underlying message is palpable: AI serves people. Humans remain in charge, so go ahead and breathe that sigh of relief.

Salesforce’s pivot tells the most interesting story. For years, Matthew McConaughey anchored spots that positioned the brand as the skeptical adult in the room, side-eyeing AI hype. They’ve abandoned that positioning with a MrBeast collaboration, staking out a bold strategic reversal. Salesforce wants to be the approachable AI company now—the AI company that feels more human because it hired humanity’s most-subscribed-to YouTuber to say so.

For its part, Wix landed on painstakingly worded language that captures the prevailing tension between satisfying the innovation narrative and allaying the public’s fears in just three words: “AI-driven and human-led.”

At a certain point, the strategy starts to eat itself. Permission-seeking works the first time. Maybe the second. Audiences give new categories room to introduce themselves and establish trust. But ChatGPT has been in the culture for over three years. Gemini. Claude. Copilot. The products have names now, and millions of people use them daily. Timid messaging doesn’t land when your audience already has the app on their phone.

By the third or fourth cycle of dancing robots and heartwarming small business stories, audiences start asking harder questions: What does this actually do for me? Where’s the specific outcome? What value can I measure against my own life?

Show Them the Proof

Google’s 50 small business stories—from SB59, feels like a lifetime ago—gesture toward specific, real applications, real entrepreneurs, real results. But the fragmentation means no single narrative punches through. The proof points exist. They’re just scattered across regional cuts that most viewers will never encounter.

The permission phase is ending. The demonstration phase has to begin.

Show me what changed. Show me the workflow that collapsed from six hours to six minutes. Show me the decision that got smarter because the data finally connected. Show me the outcome I can measure against my own Tuesday afternoon.

Dancing robots are charming. Charming doesn’t compound.

This lesson extends far beyond AI and far beyond the Super Bowl. Every emerging category burns through a permission window, that brief period when audiences extend patience while you figure out how to explain yourself. The window is generous. The window is also finite.

The brands that survive the transition are the ones that arrive with proof before the audience stops asking for explanations and starts demanding results.

The dancing better lead somewhere.