In July 2026, an investment analyst opened Jersey Mike's IPO filing. It's the disclosure document for a franchise sandwich chain — the kind of place where someone slices meat and squeezes on sauce — with roughly 3,000 locations across the United States. TechCrunch reporter Julie Bort wrote that she checked it half as a joke, with the light expectation that "surely a sandwich shop doesn't need AI." But it was there. A reference to AI sat plainly inside the filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

This moment raises a single question: what happens now if a business plan or investor deck doesn't mention AI at all?

How Fast AI Mentions Multiplied in IPO Filings

Jersey Mike's is a sandwich chain that started in New Jersey in 1956. The fact that AI showed up in the pre-IPO filing of a restaurant franchise with that much history became a talking point in the industry — not because the company is unusual, but because this has become a scene you can find just about anywhere now.

Looking at S&P 500 earnings calls, the share of companies mentioning AI climbed from around 20% in 2022 to above 50% starting in 2024. Over the same period, a string of analyses found that companies whose language included AI-related terms traded at higher valuation multiples than those that didn't. Whatever the actual causality, the market formed a belief that mentioning AI is tied to a premium — and that belief has shaped how disclosure documents get written.

The sandwich shop's AI disclosure is one slice of that trend. It's a signal that pressure to include an AI-related item in a filing has started operating even in industries with no direct connection to AI.

This Isn't the First Time It's Happened

Similar scenes have played out before. In 2017-2018, a US beverage company added "Blockchain" to its name and its stock price jumped 200% in a single day. Nothing about the company's actual business had changed. Around the turn of the millennium, simply tacking ".com" onto a company name was enough to draw venture money. Periods when a single word functions as a stand-in for a premium keep recurring.

But what's now called "AI washing" differs from those earlier cases in one respect. Unlike blockchain or a ".com" domain, AI is a tool that can genuinely be applied across a wide range of business operations. Even a restaurant chain can use AI tools for demand forecasting, staff scheduling, or customer service — and some actually do. That makes it hard to tell from the outside whether an AI mention in a filing reflects real use or is just borrowed packaging.

Seen from the opposite angle, it's hard to conclude that including AI in a disclosure is automatically evidence of overselling. The SEC has recently been tightening its guidance, pushing companies to disclose AI-related risk factors. There's a reasonable argument that telling investors what risks or opportunities this technology poses to a business model — even if the company doesn't currently use AI — is actually honest communication. The mere fact that a sandwich chain mentioned AI doesn't, by itself, prove opportunistic padding.

Even so, what the Jersey Mike's case brings to mind isn't the substance of the mention but the pressure behind it. An environment has formed in which the sense that "we have to include this" moves faster than the question "is there a reason to include this" — and that environment has now reached all the way down to the level of a sandwich shop.

Where This Pressure Reaches Korean Founders' Paperwork

The same pressure has already arrived in Korea. It's been two or three years since "How do you use AI?" became a standard question in startup investment screenings. Government support-program applications now include a field for describing AI-adoption plans. It's not unusual to hear early-stage founders say they got pitch-deck feedback that "the AI utilization plan is weak."

For solo founders and small studio operators, this is a real dilemma. Whether or not they actually use AI, the perception has spread that leaving it out of the paperwork could put them at a disadvantage in review.

There's one thing worth checking here. If you're writing AI into your pitch deck or business plan right now, which side is it on: are you describing a role AI actually plays in your operations, or are you inserting it to get past a review?

One approach used to analyze US corporate filings works like this: by looking at where an AI mention sits, how often it appears, and whether it's attached to any numbers, you can tell a good deal about whether a company's AI use is substantive or decorative. Some investors and reviewers have already started reading investor materials the same way — watching for what comes right after the sentence "we use AI."

If AI Can't Be Erased From the Paperwork

Given the market mood and the regulatory direction, dropping any mention of AI entirely isn't realistic. But there's still a choice in how you include it.

Specificity is what makes the difference. "We use AI to improve operational efficiency" carries no information at all. "We use a specific API to draft customer-response replies, cutting processing time per case from 12 minutes to 4" is different. The first sentence is written to match the mood of the moment; the second is a record of an operational fact.

At a time when AI mentions are everywhere, concrete numbers and narrowly defined use cases are what actually stick in a reader's mind. If your filing or deck already has a sentence about AI, check whether you can attach three things right next to it: which tool was used for which task, whether the before-and-after difference can be stated in numbers, and whether you're actually still operating that way today. An AI mention missing all three sits on the same shelf as a sandwich shop's IPO filing.

Whatever reason Jersey Mike's had for putting AI into its filing, the people reviewing that document read it as a signal. Someone will read your paperwork the same way. In an environment where AI washing has spread on every front, recording concrete facts is the only thing that makes a document trustworthy — and that trust is what actually determines the weight your pitch carries.