The VienerX Newsletter

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The Super Bowl remains one of the last mass cultural events in American life. While linear television audiences continue to fragment, the Super Bowl still commands over 100 million viewers and premium advertising rates. In 2026, 30-second spots reportedly sold for roughly $8 million.

Because of that scale, the Super Bowl often acts as an economic barometer. The industries most confident, and most capitalized, tend to dominate the advertising slate. This year, that industry was artificial intelligence.

AI-related companies accounted for an estimated 23% of total ad time. Whether promoting AI copilots, generative tools, or AI-powered hardware, the message was clear: artificial intelligence has arrived in the mainstream.

The question is whether this moment reflects durable maturity, or peak narrative confidence.

Public Skepticism Is Rising

At the same time AI marketing has accelerated, public skepticism appears to be growing.

A September 2025 Pew Research survey found that roughly half of Americans felt more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence, a large increase from 2022 levels which cited only 37% were skeptical. Optimism remains comparatively low at just 10% in 2025.

Marketing analytics firm Meltwater described social media reaction to AI-heavy Super Bowl ads as “sharply negative,” with critical commentary significantly outweighing positive sentiment and low overall engagement compared to other ad categories.

The disconnect is notable: advertising enthusiasm is rising as public caution increases.

Historically, that divergence has sometimes preceded repricing cycles.

A Familiar Pattern?

The Super Bowl does not cause bubbles to burst. But it has, at times, reflected peak narrative confidence.

In 2000, dot-com startups dominated Super Bowl advertising shortly before the collapse of the internet stock bubble. In 2022, cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms filled commercial breaks months before the broader crypto market fell more than a trillion dollars from its 2022 peak.

In both cases, mass-market advertising signaled that the industry had moved from early adoption to speculative saturation.

Artificial intelligence is not identical to dot-com startups or crypto tokens. Today’s leading AI firms generate real revenue and are backed by trillion-dollar technology companies. The infrastructure is real and widely used. Despite this investment can still overshoot.

And the scale of current AI investment, particularly in model training, data centers, and GPU infrastructure, is unprecedented.

Some frontier AI companies are reportedly operating with multi-billion-dollar annual losses while racing to scale. While this might make sense as corporate outlooks on the industry remain strong, this investment can quickly turn upside down if the market changes.

If There Is a Pullback, Where Does It Happen?

Two things can be true at the same time: AI is transformative, and AI investment is possibly overdone. If capital dries up, the most vulnerable areas are unlikely to be core LLM infrastructure. Instead, retrenchment would likely occur in:

1) Consumer AI Hardware Experiments
Standalone AI devices and “AI-native” hardware that struggle to demonstrate clear consumer necessity and are largely struggling with sales.

2) Third party API apps.
Products built on top of third-party APIs are in a weak market position.

3) Corporate “AI Strategy” Spending Without ROI
Board-driven AI initiatives that lack measurable productivity or revenue impact.

4) Experimental Media & Advertising Use Cases
Brands may scale back aggressive AI-generated content if backlash, which is already strong in certain areas, outweighs gains.

5. Frontier Model Arms Races
If incremental model improvements fail to justify exponential compute costs, training intensity could slow.

The repricing, if it comes, would likely hit speculative layers first, not foundational apps like ChatGPT and CoPilot.

This Time Is Actually Different, How Much So Is Up In The Air

Unlike the dot-com era, today’s AI ecosystem is already integrated into enterprise workflows and backed by huge scale technology providers. The revenue base is real.

That does not make the sector immune to over-exuberance.

The Super Bowl may not predict crashes. But it often captures the moment when an industry believes it has already won.

If artificial intelligence is entering a normalization phase, the next chapter will likely be defined less by hype and more by discipline, less by marketing saturation and more by productivity metrics.

Media and the Internet – The Promise That Didn’t Deliver

We at VienerX have expanded to a national footprint. While we are proud to serve customers all over our great country, we are also proud of our Maryland roots. Last week, the DC metro area was shaken by the news that the Washington Post, a staple of the region, is making drastic cuts to its staff, headlined by the termination of the entire sports department. This is only the latest of major news organization layoffs around the nation, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Politico, and CBS News also making cuts this year.

The emergence of the internet promised a golden age of information. News untethered from gatekeepers and more information than ever. In some ways, it has delivered on that promise, but the cost it came with has rendered the net gain questionable.

The Death of the Newspaper

Newspapers began to decline with the rise of television, particularly cable in the late ’80s and early ’90s. However, the internet drastically sped up the decline, taking out the three main pillars of revenue all at once: local advertisements, classifieds, and, of course, the subscriber base.

At first, many thought newspapers would be able to pivot to a paywalled model. This would allow them to keep the subscriber base strong while also reducing costs in production and delivery. This promise never came to fruition, as newspapers could not compete with an onslaught of free media being produced daily, as well as the numerous paywall workarounds digitally savvy users began to employ.

While this didn’t happen instantly, by the mid-2010s it was largely apparent that the decline was unstoppable.

Nationalization of News, Death of the Local Paper

As the internet continued to grow and become increasingly embedded into our daily lives, another trend emerged which damaged newspapers, monolithic news. For example, if you lived in Kansas City, you would receive the Kansas City Star, which meant that you cared about the news in Kansas City because that’s the news you received. As the internet emerged, two things happened which impacted local newspapers’ local standing.

One, news became more national. As people began to turn to cable news providers such as CNN, and Fox News, those stories moved to the forefront of the public consciousness over local stories. This trend grew even stronger with social media. As people started to participate in a global conversation on their social media platforms, the stories they cared about left the local sphere where newspapers thrived even more. All of these factors, combined with what was already discussed in the prior section, cut the newspaper down, and those who still read cared more about the national story which led to the second part of this section.

The second factor, those who still wanted newspapers began to subscribe to market leaders. Some did stay local, of course, but many started flocking to the two national “newspapers of record” as they are known. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, both of which feature millions of digital subscribers and are the rare papers that turn a profit in this day and age. In an era where news is treated largely with a national lens, it makes sense to subscribe to the best journalism available instead of the local flavor.

More Content, Less News

The promise of a golden age of information did deliver in part. There is indeed more information readily available than ever before; the trade-off has been a drastic decline in quality. Newspapers, while flawed and not without bias, have editorial standards, professional journalists, and the benefit of fact checking.

In today’s information economy, the only thing that is truly rewarded is attention-grabbing. In an age where every click is monetized, the unfortunate reality is that many people who create news on the internet work within a system where it is less about being correct and more about speed and drawing as many eyeballs as possible.

Another major drawback of this new age is the death of local media and an explosion of “news deserts.” According to the University of North Carolina School of Media, over half of counties in the U.S. have been reduced to just one news publication, most of which publish weekly.

The final, and perhaps most important, drawback of the information age is the reduction of investigative journalism. Returning to the Washington Post sports section, the revelation of the major harassment scandal that ultimately played a large role in the departure of Washington Football owner Dan Snyder was orchestrated through months of investigative work by journalists.

Journalism plays a key role in checking those in power. The reduction of newspapers into a click-based economy means fewer people are working to report on the misdeeds of those in positions of authority.

Technology and the Future It Shapes

VienerX works in the technology sector. Our company was founded on a vision of where the future was heading: digital. We are often excited about what new technologies bring and what they can do to make people’s lives and businesses more efficient.

One thing that we must be wary of as a society is the trade-offs we make as we advance. There are many good things that this new economy has brought. Digital creators have done many great things, and we hope a balance can be found between the importance of legacy journalism and what the future can bring. If that balance is found, hopefully someone will be there to report on it.

VienerX and VOIP provider/longtime partner Nextiva have joined forces to produce a series of blog posts focused on VOIP. Read an excerpt of the second, focused on call centers.

Whether building an in-house call center or switching to cloud-based software, call center costs can vary greatly. Factors such as staffing, call volume, service levels, and technology influence call center pricing. Understanding exactly what your business will be paying for before your call center goes live will help you plan your budget and avoid unexpected bills. 

In this guide, we’ll cover what’s included in call center costs and show you how to estimate and control your total spend so you can choose a solution that fits your budget without sacrificing customer experience. 

There is no one-size-fits-all number when it comes to call center costs. Every business is unique, with various needs. If you’re running an inbound call center for customer support, for example, the setup will be different than a sales-focused, outbound call center. To get an accurate estimate, we’ll need to break costs down into clear categories. 

Common call center costs include labor, which is usually the largest cost, software, overhead, hardware, IT support, usage, and other miscellaneous expenses. 

Other factors that can influence the cost of running your call center include: 

Here’s a closer look at some common call center costs:

The highest cost for any call center is typically staffing. The key to running an effective call center is the people behind it. Working in a call center can be stressful, so paying agents well is essential for retention. Employees who are poorly paid perform worse and quit at higher rates, leaving a cycle of recruiting and training new employees. 

When budgeting for a call center, expect to pay the following for staffing: 

In addition to employee wages, many call centers offer benefits like health insurance, housing stipends, or contributions to internet and power bills for remote employees. Although the cost of labor is high, paying agents well keeps morale high and ensures better retention. 

According to Nextiva, you can expect to pay between $850,000 and $900,000 a year in labor for a call center with 20 agents.