Microsoft's 2024 Super Bowl Ad: Watch How Copilot AI Can Help Unlock Your True Potential

Super Bowl LVII is taking place this Sunday night at Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada, the unincorporated Las Vegas-adjacent town that contains the bulk of the strip. With the NFL's annual championship game comes other traditions, most notably big sales on big TVs, the star-studded halftime show and the array of fancy, expensive, intricately produced commercials designed to capitalize on the year's most-watched television event. On Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled its spot for the big game, which showcases its Copilot AI companion.

After showing various young adults with onscreen text giving examples of things they were told they couldn't do, the first half of the minute-long commercial closes with a declaration of "But I say: Watch me." That's when the spot pivots to examples of how Copilot can be used. "Generate storyboard images for the dragon scene in my script" is the first one, followed by "Write code for my 3D open world game." (The former is presumably using Copilot in an existing screenplay document, while the latter is less clearly explained, particularly since it's so generic.) "Quiz me in organic chemistry" is pretty self-explanatory," as is "Design a sign for classic truck repair garage Mike's..." which generated several old-school neon-style sign designs.

To wind down the ad, it shows a woman typing "Can you help me" and Copilot answering "Yes, I can help you" before closing by showing off the slogan of "Anyone. Anywhere. Any device."

At least initially, Copilot, which Microsoft classifies as an AI assistant, underwhelmed its users and was seemingly ill-equipped for what it was promised to be capable of. Its utility in Windows 11 was incredibly limited, in large part because it was a glorified version of the Bing Chatbot that has since been rebranded as a web-based version of Copilot. Features that seemed like no-brainers, like using a Copilot prompt to get into a menu deep within system settings instead of clicking through various preceding menus, were not implemented. To make matters worse, only apps could be opened from Copilot, not even other types of files.

There have been improvements to Copilot in recent months, though. The free tool has been upgraded to the latest and greatest models from OpenAI, including the GPT-4 Turbo Large Language Model, which requires a $20 per month ChatGPT Plus subscription if you go through OpenAI. The image generation AI has also been updated to the latest revision of DALL-E 3. So even though there is still a lot of work to be done on Copilot, it still has plenty of value as a free way to access the newest OpenAI tech. Since Copilot leverages Microsoft's Bing search engine to provide citation links for factual matters, it's arguably a better choice than the base OpenAI versions, regardless.