What are San Francisco's AI Billboards really telling us?

The average cost of a highway or Market Street billboard in San Francisco is about $11,000 per month. They are not cheap, and you cannot drive or walk anywhere without seeing 20 or more AI billboards—the effect is overwhelming. 

About six months ago, I started photographing them. Here is a breakdown of different messages companies use to promote AI, and a sense of how much AI is dominating marketing in San Francisco.

“Yeah we do AI too”

When established companies first start advertising AI, usually they start with “now with AI” or “Powered by AI”, instead of promoting new capabilities or benefits that AI gives the product:

“We do AI better than anyone else”

A step up from “Yeah we do AI too” is stating we do AI better, or we have AI that-actually-works. Here are two billboards from Salesforce. The left-side is an early billboard, showing humans and AI agents having fun working together. The right-side is a newer billboard, with the simpler what-AI-was-meant-to-be message:

This “we do it better” approach is popular right now. Here are some other examples, including Mistral— one of the leading large language models (LLMs), and Zendesk who promote “next generation” AI agents.

“Our consumer product now has AI”

Most consumer brands like Ray-Ban, Apple and Google (devices) also do a variation of the “Yeah we do AI too”. In these examples you see Ray-Ban glasses with Meta AI, iPhones with Apple Intelligence, Pixel phones with Gemini.

“We make it simpler”

Most development and infrastructure tools use very simple messages. “Build AI better using our stuff”, “We have GPUs”, “We host Lllama”, “We let you write AI Infra as code” (tough to parse as you’re driving).

“Hire our Virtual Employees”

Sales and marking companies are increasingly giving their AI agents friendly employee names. One of the most provocative is Artisan who have run an extended campaign about replacing humans with AI agents:

“Customers trust our AI”

Databricks is one of the few companies that advertises successful-company-uses-our-AI. This is a variation of “Yeah we do AI too”, but delivered with a stronger message “These customers trust our AI, you should too”

Summary: What does it all mean?

In short, it’s surreal. Gone are the billboards advertising the exciting finale of the “Americas Got Talent” TV show or reminding us to eat “Coco Pops San Francisco’s favorite breakfast”; replaced with the message "everything comes with AI”. At the same time, we read headlines about layoffs because companies have successfully replaced employees with AI agents.

San Francisco is a city filled with software engineers who are either developing AI agents, or using AI agents that every week get a little closer to replacing them. The freeway billboards encourage us to put the foot down and accelerate. Without getting into a debate about automation, job displacement or “creative destruction,” you have to admit there’s some irony here.

It’s the billboard irony in San Francisco that forces you to think deeper about AI. The discourse on AI has been flattened down to an “Is AI good or bad?” debate. That’s not nuanced enough to be productive.

Yes, there’s something surreal about the billboards in San Francisco right now. As you’re driving down 101, maybe they’re a good prompt to ask “Where is this path really taking us?”