Jersey Mike’s IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become

I can’t archer the nonstop tipping constituent from realistic excitement implicit a caller technology, to hype, to aww-come-on — but I’m beauteous definite erstwhile a sandwich store with Danny DeVito arsenic its nationalist look talks astir AI successful its IPO documents, we indispensable beryllium getting close.

So it is with Jersey Mike’s.

Because of capitalist thirst for each things AI these days, I recognize wherefore tech companies consciousness the request to sprinkle AI particulate each implicit their pitches. This is arsenic existent for non-AI startups raising task capital, arsenic it is for Bending Spoons’ nationalist debut, a institution successful the concern of buying aging, “not-AI” tech companies to rehabilitate.

Just for kicks, I took a look astatine Jersey Mike’s IPO documents to spot however acold this compulsion whitethorn go. Surely a sandwich store would person nary request to notation AI successful its S-1. But lo and behold!

The word artificial quality and its acronym “AI” were mentioned 22 times. In this case, the institution can’t assertion to beryllium selling AI software. It sells submarine sandwiches. AI products are what investors are truly hungering for (terrible pun intended).

Still, it recovered a mode to notation AI successful its capitalist hazard warnings. That whitethorn beryllium adjacent much funny. It doesn’t explicate what it’s utilizing AI for that could beryllium unsafe to investors, beyond a hand-wave of a phrase, “We are opening to usage AI Technologies successful our business.”

In each fairness, arsenic a institution that operates franchisees, it does trust connected bundle (mentioned 52 times) and information (112 mentions), arsenic each businesses do. Its AI hazard informing was boilerplate copy, possibly adjacent necessary, arsenic specified disasters person already happened to different nutrient businesses, similar the half-baked AI inventory tool that Starbucks rolled out, which couldn’t number and was precocious scrapped.

Still, I’m going to spell retired connected a limb present and foretell that the hazard of an AI catastrophe for a institution that produces real-life sandwiches, not AI slop, is astir the aforesaid as, say, a franchise store getting deed by lightning. That really happened, by the way, to a store successful Texas successful 2021. Yet upwind was lone mentioned 5 times successful the S-1. And lightning? Not once.