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

I can’t tell the exact tipping point from realistic excitement over a new technology, to hype, to aww-come-on — but I’m pretty sure when a sandwich shop with Danny DeVito as its public face talks about AI in its IPO documents, we must be getting close.

Because of investor thirst for all things AI these days, I understand why tech companies feel the need to sprinkle AI dust all over their pitches. This is as true for non-AI startups raising venture capital as it is for Bending Spoons’ public debut, a company in the business of buying aging, “not-AI” tech companies to rehabilitate.

Just for kicks, I took a look at Jersey Mike’s IPO documents to see how far this compulsion may go. Surely a sandwich shop would have no need to mention AI in its S-1. But lo and behold!

The term artificial intelligence and its acronym “AI” were mentioned 22 times. In this case, the company can’t claim to be selling AI software. It sells submarine sandwiches. AI products are what investors are really hungering for (terrible pun intended).

Still, it found a way to mention AI in its investor-risk warnings. That may be even more funny. It doesn’t explain what it’s using AI for that could be dangerous to investors, beyond a hand-wave of a phrase, “We are beginning to use AI Technologies in our business.”

In all fairness, as a company that operates franchisees, it does rely on software (mentioned 52 times) and data (112 mentions), as all businesses do. Its AI risk warning was boilerplate copy, perhaps even necessary, as such disasters have already happened to other food businesses, like the half-baked AI inventory tool that Starbucks rolled out, which couldn’t count and was recently scrapped.

Still, I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that the risk of an AI disaster for a company that produces real-life sandwiches, not AI slop, is about the same as, say, a franchise shop getting hit by lightning. That actually happened, by the way, to a shop in Texas in 2021. Yet weather was only mentioned five times in the S-1. And lightning? Not once.