Maury Povich came out of retirement to star in a new campaign for this AI tool for creatives

Maury Povich’s daytime TV show Maury—a parade of salacious domestic disputes and paternity tests—ran for a whopping 31 seasons until his 2022 retirement. Which is why it was unexpected that 87-year-old Povich found himself at the So Ho headquarters of AI-enhanced cloud services company Air on May 5, mingling with a crowd 20- and 30-somethings, his slacks, button down, and knit half-zip sweater standing out easily amid the maxi skirts and stick-and-poke tattoos. He was there as part of Air’s “Cinco de Maury” event, a launch party and screening of the company’s new campaign, On Air with Maury Povich. The 12-minute video brought the host out of retirement (temporarily) to have him mediate three segments that give classic Maury tropes an absurdist update for the AI era. Air fully committed to recreating the essence of Maury, even reproducing the set and a live studio audience. The video includes three segments that all revolve around AI, including a paternity test to determine the father of a synthetic girlfriend, a lying boyfriend creating AI-altered images of his grandma, and a concerned mother who thinks her son is addicted to the technology. But Povich isn’t taking part because he considers himself an AI booster. “I would not have done it if it was strictly AI,” he says. “The fact that [the ad] had this great human, creative quality to it is when I said okay. Just when I thought I was out of this business, they dragged me back in.” What does Air do? Air, which was launched in 2021 by Shane Hegde and Tyler Strand, provides an all-in-one operations and cloud storage platform for creative teams. The product’s key capabilities include virtual asset management and AI-powered organization and search functions, including image recognition, automated versioning, approval workflows, and multiplication for scale. The company has raised over $70 million to date, with investments from Avenir, Tiger Global, Headline Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, WndrCo, and Slack Ventures. Air pairs i