Jersey Mike's IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become
Jersey Mike's filed for an IPO with an S-1 mentioning "AI" 29 times despite being a sandwich chain, illustrating how companies across sectors are inflating their AI credentials to attract investor interest. The article argues this reflects the broader AI hype cycle where even non-tech businesses feel pressure to label routine automation as artificial intelligence.
Background
- Jersey Mike's is a large US submarine-sandwich franchise. The article mocks its IPO filing for name-dropping "AI" and "machine learning" — e.g., using an algorithm to decide how much mayo to put on a sandwich — to dress up a mundane business as a tech play, thereby chasing a higher stock valuation.
- This reflects a broader market pattern (2024–2026) where hundreds of companies rebrand routine automation or basic software as "AI" to attract investors during the prolonged AI boom, even if their actual business has little to do with frontier AI models or data moats.
- The critique is that the hype has become so pervasive that even a traditional fast-food chain feels compelled to pretend it is an AI company, which may signal an AI investment bubble similar to past "dot-com" excesses.