In July 2026, an investment analyst opened Jersey Mike's IPO filing. It was the disclosure document of a franchise sandwich chain — the kind of place where staff slice meat and squeeze sauce bottles — with roughly 3,000 locations across the United States. TechCrunch reporter Julie Bort wrote that she checked it almost as a joke, expecting that "surely a sandwich shop doesn't need AI." But there it was. A reference to AI, sitting plainly inside a filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The scene raises one question: what happens now if a business plan or investor deck doesn't mention AI at all?
How fast AI crept into IPO filings
Jersey Mike's is a sandwich chain that got its start in New Jersey in 1956. The fact that a long-running restaurant franchise's pre-IPO filing name-checked AI became industry talk not because the company itself was unusual, but because the same scene has become common everywhere.
Looking at earnings calls across the S&P 500, the share of companies mentioning AI climbed from roughly 20% in 2022 to more than 50% from 2024 onward. Over the same period, a string of analyses found that companies whose disclosures included AI-related terms tended to command higher valuation multiples than those that didn't. Whatever the underlying causality, the market came to associate mentioning AI with a premium — and that perception started shaping how filings get written.
The sandwich shop's AI disclosure is one slice of that trend. It's a signal that even industries with no direct connection to AI have begun to feel pressure to include an AI-related line in their paperwork.
This isn't the first time
Similar scenes have played out before. Between 2017 and 2018, a US beverage company added "blockchain" to its name and saw its stock jump 200% in a single day, with nothing about its actual business changing. Around the year 2000, 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.
Still, 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 cover.
Seen from the other side, it's hard to conclude that including AI in a disclosure is automatically evidence of overstatement. The SEC has recently been tightening guidance that pushes companies to disclose AI-related risk factors. There's a legitimate argument that telling investors what risks or opportunities the technology poses for your business model — even if you don't currently use it — is simply honest communication. The mere fact that a sandwich chain mentioned AI doesn't, by itself, prove opportunistic padding.
What the Jersey Mike's case really calls attention to, though, isn't the substance of the mention but the pressure behind it. An environment has formed where the mood of "we have to include this" moves faster than the question of "is there a reason to include this" — and that environment has now reached all the way down to the sandwich-shop level.
Where this pressure lands on Korean founders' paperwork
The same pressure has already arrived in Korea. It's been two or three years since "How are you using AI?" became a standard question in startup investment screenings. Government support-program applications now include a section for describing AI adoption plans. It's not uncommon to hear early-stage founders say they got pitch-deck feedback along the lines of "your AI angle is weak."
For solo founders and small studio operators, this is a real dilemma. Whether or not they actually use AI, there's a widespread sense that leaving it out of the paperwork could put them at a disadvantage in screening.
There's one thing worth checking here. If AI shows up in your pitch deck or business plan, which kind of mention is it? Is it describing a role AI genuinely plays in your operations, or is it there just to get past the screening?
One method used to analyze US corporate disclosures looks at where an AI mention sits, how often it appears, and whether it's tied to any actual figures — and from that, you can tell a fair amount about whether a company's AI use is real or just decorative language. Some investors and screeners have already started reading investor materials the same way. They watch for what comes after the sentence "We use AI."
If AI can't be erased from the paperwork
Given the current market mood and regulatory direction, leaving AI out entirely isn't realistic. But there's still a choice in how it's included.
Specificity makes the difference. "We use AI to improve operational efficiency" carries no information at all. "We use a specific API to draft customer-service responses, cutting handling time from 12 minutes to 4 minutes per case" is something else entirely. The first is a sentence written to match the mood; the second is a record of an operational fact.
At a moment when AI mentions are everywhere, concrete numbers and narrowly defined use cases are what actually stick with a reader. If your paperwork already has a sentence about AI in it, check whether you can attach three things next to it: which tool was used for which task, whether the before-and-after difference can be expressed as a number, and whether you're still actually running it 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 in its filing, the people reviewing that filing read it as a signal. Someone will read your paperwork the same way. In an environment where AI washing has spread everywhere, recording concrete facts is the only thing that makes a document trustworthy — and that trust is what actually carries the weight in a pitch.
