Shake Your Bots Off: how Svedka and Silverside AI made the first AI-generated Super Bowl ad with ComfyUI

On February 8, 2026, Super Bowl LX aired the first primarily AI-generated commercial in the game's history and Sazerac's first Super Bowl spot. "Shake Your Bots Off" starred Svedka's Fembot, revived the previous August after a 12-year hiatus alongside a new partner, Brobot.

Behind the spot was a problem no traditional pipeline could solve. When Sazerac acquired Svedka, the brand had been, as Svedka's Global VP of Integrated Marketing & Innovation Amy Remley puts it, "neglected for about 10 years," and the team no longer had the CGI files for its most recognizable character. Silverside AI, the studio Svedka partnered with to rebuild the Fembot and produce the spot, recreated her and her world on workflows Silverside built in ComfyUI, on a timeline no linear production could match.

At a glance

The Output

With workflows built in ComfyUI, Svedka and Silverside AI delivered:

• The first primarily AI-generated Super Bowl commercial, per ADWEEK
• 12 separate robot actions in the first 10 seconds of the spot
• A production timeline that historically runs half a year, reduced to under one month
• A crowdsourced dance, arriving after the main scenes were built, choreographed into the robots in hours, with the Fembot's moves done in minutes

The Problem: an icon with no source files

A revived Fembot was the brand's best shot at a sticky asset in a category where the liquid offers little differentiation. "Most households in America have vodka," Remley notes, "and it is colorless, odorless, and ultimately it's pretty flavorless." But the files that created the character were nowhere to be found.

"If I'm completely honest, we didn't have the files for the whole robot. She's a robot. If you're going to bring her back and create her world, you're going to have to create it somehow in post. As a production and advertisement company, AI was the answer."

Amy Remley, Global VP Integrated Marketing & Innovation, Svedka

"We were lucky enough that we stumbled upon and met up with Silverside," Remley said, "because that was really the only choice we had to bring her back to life."

Sazerac bought its Super Bowl slot before picking a brand, and Svedka won the internal pitch on the idea, not the technology: "The how wasn't as important as the what," Remley said. The brand had prototyped three spots using AI the previous fall, but the game meant national scrutiny with no celebrity to anchor the spot. The Fembot has no voice, so AI itself would be the celebrity.

"At some point, we absolutely knew we were walking into the eye of a storm. The criticism, the conversation, the haters, that's not the worst thing for a brand. The worst thing for a brand is being irrelevant."

Amy Remley, Global VP Integrated Marketing & Innovation, Svedka

A traditional pipeline, months of locked boards, locked scripts, and locked music, could not rebuild a character from scratch and keep improving her until air. The team needed a system where nothing had to be locked.

The Solution: workflows that kept every decision open

Rebuilding an icon, three teams at once

Silverside started with paper, pencil, and industrial design to modernize the original Fembot and create Brobot. From there the studio ran in parallel what would normally run in sequence: one group trained AI models on the new characters, another trained models to build their world, and a third developed candidate stories. Animated prototypes for every script the team liked existed within days.

Component workflows, not prompt-and-pray

Rather than generating shots from single prompts and hoping, Silverside built its workflows in ComfyUI, a system built around connecting different components together. The production even had to develop new workflows for progressive changes, so another idea did not mean restarting generations. A dedicated final pass cleaned remaining hallucinations before delivery.

"No prompting and praying here. In the first 10 seconds alone, our two robots performed 12 separate actions, a level of choreography way above any AI production."

Shake Your Bots Off, behind-the-scenes film

Nothing is locked, ever

With strategy, creative, and production running simultaneously, the ad stayed editable in ways linear production never allows. Review cycles ran around the clock, with new cuts texted to the brand at 2 AM. Per Sazerac CMO Sara Saunders, Silverside made significant changes to the ad just a week before launch.

"Nothing is locked ever. Ever. We shipped to NBC and I'm still getting calls like, 'Hey, can we tweak it?'"

Amy Remley, Global VP Integrated Marketing & Innovation, Svedka

Far from cheapening the process, the openness intensified it.

"We spent more time on this ad, more touches with our creatives, because once you realize that you can have a new idea and change it as you go, you want to change it a lot."

Amy Remley, Global VP Integrated Marketing & Innovation, Svedka

That freedom demanded discipline. "You have to have a very tight team and you have to have a lot of trust in order to move fluidly through that chaos, because you're making decisions constantly," said Drew Heidel, Sazerac's Strategy, Account & Operations Director. When everything is controllable, "theoretically anything is an option," and "clarity of intent becomes incredibly important."

The dance came from the crowd

In parallel, Svedka ran an open call for the routine the robots would perform. The winning dance came from Jessica Rizzardi, a 23-year-old Nashville resident whose TikTok dance won the contest, and Silverside choreographed it into the robots in a matter of hours. The timing is the point: "By the time our main scenes were ready, we had the winning dance from TikTok waiting for us," the film recounts. "We just had to plug it into our workflow. And in minutes, the fembot had all her moves done." A crowdsourced routine could not have survived a pipeline locked months earlier.

A crowdsourced routine, choreographed into the Fembot through Silverside's workflows. Source: Svedka.

Automating the tedious, keeping the craft

None of this removed people from the work. "We had just as many brains and hands touching this ad as any traditional production ad," Remley said. "It just was all happening in post." What changed is where those hands went: automation absorbed tedious passes (in animation generally, workflow automation absorbs steps like the keyframe-to-coloring passes artists have long dreaded), and the systems brought ideas to life fast enough that the team could keep inventing while the film was already being made. As the behind-the-scenes film frames it, this is not a story of technology replacing humans; it is one technology replacing an older one.

For PJ Pereira, co-founder of Silverside AI, that unlocked process was the point. As he told ADWEEK:

"It's a creative freedom we've never had as an industry. Before, all the steps of the creative process needed to be locked. This process allowed us to keep revising all the decisions and ensure it was the best, which made it more human than ever."

PJ Pereira, Co-founder, Silverside AI

Why ComfyUI

The freedom to keep revising rests on control, and control is what Silverside built its ComfyUI process around. Single-prompt tools fail in a familiar way: the result is close enough, but changing one more thing changes everything. Workflow systems end that cycle. They come in when a team is ready to take experimentation into production: instead of a slot machine that hands back something to be used or discarded, the workflow environment leaves every element of a shot under the production's control.

That control, in Silverside's hands, compressed the schedule: a timeline that historically runs half a year was reduced to under one month. When the spot finally aired, the Comfy team watched it like everyone else: a room of tech people in front of a Super Bowl, unsure of the rules of the game, waiting for the ads to come on.

The Takeaway

Silverside's production architecture did not outsource creativity to a model. It gave humans more chances to exercise it: more iterations, more touches, more decisions, later than any traditional pipeline would allow.

"We have been very intentional that we've done everything to the utmost quality and there is human feeling in it. AI isn't a shortcut."

Sara Saunders, CMO, Sazerac

And on where creativity lives, Saunders is just as direct: "The reality is, AI is not creative. We need humans to be able to brief, direct, experiment, edit, iterate, prototype, and get a quality piece of creative out the door."

For brands considering the leap, the Svedka team's advice is to lock the one thing that matters and unlock everything else: brands should "decide and lock what they stand for," as Heidel puts it, then build "a team that really trusts and collaborates at the speed of AI, because that's the only thing that's holding you back."

As for why the Fembot came back at all, Remley is clear: "It's a robot reminding humans to be human, to get out of your phone and actually talk to people around you." She is not going away.

Super Bowl '26 ad spot, Shake Your Bots Off. Source: Svedka.

"At the end of the day, craft is passion. A very human passion manifested every day by our animators, editors, special effects professionals, designers, colorists, musicians, and writers."

Shake Your Bots Off, behind-the-scenes film