An image of Matthew McConaughey dining in the rain created by SDXL 1.0, 3D Game v2 preset on NightCafé, random number seed 2924859665, sampling method K_DPMPP_2M. That's A.I. for you.
According to Salesforce, every business should be using “artificial intelligence.” And that A.I. should of course be Agentforce from Salesforce. Without Agentforce, your business makes such amateurishly basic mistakes of customer service that you will be wondering how is it that your business even survived all these years before Agentforce came along.
In the first of these series of ads with Matthew McConaughey, the Dallas Buyers Club and True Detective star is in the outdoor dining area of a restaurant waiting to be served some food he ordered while it rains.
We’ve had restaurants for centuries before anyone even thought about A.I., and apparently without A.I. no human waiter would think to ask a high profile diner if he really wants to eat outside during a downpour.
The latest ad I’ve seen puts Matthew McConaughey in a hospital. It’s even more ridiculous than the ad at the restaurant, but it also makes some unintentionally trenchant commentary on the serious problems of health care in America.
A hospital is a business, like any other. The most important thing for a hospital is to make sales. Saving lives is just an added bonus, entirely secondary to the bottom line.
Medical mistakes are a real problem. But the medical mistake in this scenario is utterly absurd.
Okay, let’s unpack that. Matthew McConaughey is in a hospital because he’s hurt. Maybe he injured his arm doing his own stunts in a movie. Even if that’s not the case, movie stars are not immune from accidents. So far the ad presents a situation that is believable.
But he’s actually there to see a specialist? Okay, that might be the case. Maybe he received first aid in the ambulance, and now the specialist needs to do something specialized. Instead of the correct specialist, a gynecologist shows up?
Now, there are legitimate reasons why a man would need to see a gynecologist. But those legitimate reasons tend to be rare. The gynecologist who shows up doesn’t even bother to ask basic questions like whether or not the name on the patient record matches the name of the patient in front of her.
The ad also comments on the problem of fragmented care, but I doubt that was on purpose. The ads in this series always contrast the lousy customer service Matthew McConaughey gets from a business that doesn’t use Salesforce with the excellent service Woody Harrelson gets from a business that does use Salesforce. In the hospital context, that means Harrelson goes to the hospital a little later than McConaughey but gets treated sooner, and gets to rub it in McConaughey’s face.
While it is certainly believable that two white men could get vastly different quality of care at the same hospital, it does seem a little implausible to me that this could happen to two rich and famous white men.
I predict that medical mistakes will increase, mistakes not as obvious as what we see in this ad. But that will be because of A.I., of course combined with natural stupidity.
