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 SoHo 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 its product, which leverages AI capabilities to automate processes for creatives, with branding that embodies the company’s ethos that human creativity is irreplaceable.
“We believe that humans will always be at the center of creativity, that creativity is not a problem to be solved. In fact, it’s something to be celebrated,” Strand told Fast Company. However, he added that “we think that there are a lot of aspects to the creative process that could be made more efficient or automated with AI.”
“Our company mission right now is to find the balance between those two things.”
Building a brand out of thin Air
The company made its stance clear in March, when Hegde wrote a handwritten letter that was published in the Sunday edition of the New York Times with the headline “AI would never smoke a cigarette with you.” In the letter, Hegde asserts that there is no reality in which AI will replace creative work—a stance he understands is counterintuitive for a tech founder to take.
Hegde and Strand said that the Times letter, timed to coincide with the launch of AI design and editing tool Air Canvas, was the most successful campaign launched to date. The ad led to four times as many product-sign ups in April 2026 compared to the month prior, leading to the best month of revenue the company ever had.
The irony of Air, an AI-enabled platform, drawing inspiration from two traditional forms of media—print newspapers and television—for its latest campaigns is not lost on its co-founders.
“I feel like they’re both actually cut from the same cloth, and they’re these allergic reactions to the fully AI generated future,” said Strand. “We’re sort of reverting to these traditional forms of media.”
There’s a clear appetite for the nostalgia of the Maury campaign. Since it was posted on May 5, On Air with Maury Povich has racked up over 1.5 million views on Instagram, as well as 82,000 interactions (comments, likes, shares).
“We love to do what we think of as attention grabbing and aspirational marketing,” Strand said. “The kind of stuff that makes a marketer stop and say, ‘I wish I had thought of that.’”
