I can’t tell the exact tipping point from the realistic excitement for a new technology, the hype, come on — but I’m sure when a sandwich with Danny DeVito as a public face talks about artificial intelligence in its IPO documents, we must be getting close.
So it is with Jersey Mike’s.
With investors’ thirst for all things AI these days, I understand why tech companies feel the need to sprinkle AI dust all over their niches. This is true both for non-AI startups raising venture capital and for the public debut of Bending Spoons, a company that markets “non-AI” technology companies for restoration.
Just for kicks, I took a look at Jersey Mike’s IPO documents to see how far this compulsion can go. Surely a sandwich wouldn’t need to mention artificial intelligence in it S-1. But lo!
The term artificial intelligence and its acronym “AI” were mentioned 22 times. In this case, the company cannot claim to sell artificial intelligence software. He sells underwater sandwiches. AI products are what investors are really hungry for (a terrible pun).
However, it has found a way to mention AI in investment risk warnings. This might be even funnier. It doesn’t explain what it’s using AI for, which could be risky for investors, beyond a hand wave of a phrase, “We’re starting to use AI technologies in our business.”
In all fairness, as a company that operates franchisees, it relies on software (cited 52 times) and data (112 mentions), as all businesses do. The AI risk warning was a copycat, perhaps a necessary one, as such disasters have already occurred in other food businesses, such as the half-baked AI inventory tool that launched Starbucks, which couldn’t measure up and was recently discontinued.
That said, I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the risk of an AI disaster for a real-life sandwich company, not AI, is about the same as, say, a franchise store being struck by lightning. This actually happened, by the way, at a store in Texas in 2021. However, weather was only mentioned five times in the S-1. And lightning? Not even once.
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