AI may be all that it is cracked up to be and its naysayers may well end up eating their words one day.

But that day does not appear to be today, or any time soon for that matter. The AI products that are being released today are presented as serious and groundbreaking. However, for most of these, thanks to advertisements, it is simply impossible to take them seriously.

Two companies that have demoed AI products recently come to mind; Amazon’s Alexa+ and Salesforce with Agentforce.

Amazon’s Alexa+

Amazon’s Alexa+ was shown off to spectators as the next step in digital assistance. Predictably well-choreographed, the demonstration presented some interesting and exciting prospects.

Panos Panay, senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, had Alexa+ identify songs by description and jump ahead to particular scenes in a show on Prime Video, among other functions.

What stood out was the integration with third-party apps, with Alexa+ making a restaurant reservation on OpenTable, adding it to the user’s calendar, and booking an Uber for their friend from JFK airport to the restaurant.

While it is just a demo of a product and it is not available to consumers just yet, there are already problems. This demo makes some very bold assumptions about what AI can do. First and foremost, it suggests that AI can identify a person’s location without any details beyond “They’re at this airport”—a miraculous feat!

Less flippantly, there are some serious things to think about here. How is Alexa supposed to know where the friend is?

This idea assumes that users are fine sharing their location with someone else’s AI bot, perhaps by default. Would that be through Amazon or Uber? Would both users need to be paying for Alexa+ and consent to have their location shared every time they would like to book an Uber for each other?

At a certain point, it seems more prudent to just have the person who needs the Uber book it for themselves.

Most of what this demo showed is cool and seems practical. Being able to use voice commands to accurately get what you want from a digital assistant in a closed environment within a user’s control makes one think of Tony Stark and his AI Jarvis. But booking an Uber based on next to no information seems too far-fetched and damages the impact of the whole demo.

This is an isolated example, but it distracts from the potential viability of the wider product and suggests that the question of “Why does AI need to be involved in this process?” has not yet been answered.

Salesforce’s Agentforce

Salesforce’s adverts take not answering the above question to another level.

Salesforce ran adverts for Agentforce at this year’s Superbowl featuring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson.

In one, McConaughey is rushing through Heathrow airport having not used Agentforce AI to show him the fastest route to his gate, which has changed suddenly, meaning he has to rush.

In another, McConaughey is seated at a restaurant outside in the pouring rain and is served a dish that he did not order because he did not use Agentforce to make his reservation.

The ad is filled with problems. Firstly, no amount of AI is going to be able to aid a person who has arrived without enough time to comfortably get to their gate before their flight, and what restaurant is going to seat someone outside in the pouring rain when there is no cover and serve them food they did not order?

Who books a table at a restaurant and orders something ahead of time that they dislike so much that they will not eat it? And why does anyone think that AI can fix that?

That is not how anything works, and it is baffling that anyone at Salesforce thinks that it is.

Agentforce might indeed be very useful for some people in some circumstances, but it is being presented as an everyday product for everyone in such a way as to make it seem like something thought up by someone completely detached from reality.

Like the Alexa+, there is no way that we should be expected to take these products and this technology seriously if this is how the companies making it choose to show off the best possible versions of them.