{"id":461014,"date":"2026-04-30T07:27:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T07:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/461014\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T07:27:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T07:27:17","slug":"failed-shoe-companys-pivot-to-ai-is-for-the-birds-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/461014\/","title":{"rendered":"Failed shoe company\u2019s pivot to AI is for the birds \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m sorry Daniel Wiffen<\/a>, but your days are numbered. After more than two decades in technology journalism, I\u2019ve decided to switch my focus to being an Olympic-level distance swimmer.<\/p>\n

Now, you may think that such a switch at 45 years of age is questionable. After all, Wiffen has youth, experience and knowledge on his side along with the financial support required to get to his current level.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s before we even get to talent. Meanwhile, I\u2019m overweight, have two bad ankles and one not great knee, can\u2019t recall the last time I got in a pool, and don\u2019t even know where to look for funding. Yet I am confident that Flying Emmet Ryan will remove the Wiffenator from the podium.<\/p>\n

At least I\u2019m more confident of that happening than I am that Allbirds will succeed as an artificial intelligence (AI) business. A failed shoe company has pivoted and now looks set to be a failed AI company.<\/p>\n

Allbirds was the darling of the Silicon Valley set. The company made wool runners that were pitched as being eco-friendly and this was lapped up by techies looking to show their sustainable credentials.<\/p>\n

At its peak, shortly after going public in 2021, Allbirds reached a valuation of $4 billion (\u20ac3.4 billion). This was a unicorn with a rocket strapped to its back. Only there wasn\u2019t enough fuel in the form of sales.<\/p>\n

In simple terms, the idea of wool shoes just didn\u2019t appeal to as big a market as Allbirds and its investors expected. Sales of $63 million in Q3 of 2021 were fine for a rising star still building. The fall to just $33 million in the same period in 2025 was catastrophic. With losses mounting, the future was the grave.<\/p>\n

By the start of this year, the business decided to close its last physical stores and focus on wholesale. That was already an enormous shift from the direct-to-consumer model it was built on. By March, even that was gone with the brands and footwear line sold to American Exchange Group, a brand management firm.<\/p>\n

Allbirds as it was had nothing but a shell, but it was still a publicly traded shell. The pivot, a common practice with hip tech firms that hit hard times, was still a shock.<\/p>\n

A cash injection of $50 million was announced as part of the company\u2019s switch to the AI sector. The company value leapt by over 400 per cent at one stage, up from $3 a share to over $13 and a market cap close to $120 million.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just one slight problem \u2013 well there are several, but one in the moment \u2013 it wasn\u2019t entirely clear what Allbirds was actually going to do. The AI hype machine is long out of control, but why the business was making this particular pivot hasn\u2019t really been explained.<\/p>\n

It gets worse. There are many different subsectors within AI that Allbirds, which plans to rebrand as NewBird AI, could have targeted. It has decided to take on arguably the toughest, most crowded and most commodified market of the lot.<\/p>\n

The business plans to sell GPUs-as-a-service, essentially providing leased access to the chips required to power AI operations. This capital has been raised to gain access to these chips and the data centres they sit in to resell to other businesses.<\/p>\n

This is not a novel idea. There\u2019s no shortage of companies heavily active in this space already and you\u2019ve heard of several of them. These include Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).<\/p>\n

These are all valued in the trillions of dollars, that\u2019s four more zeros at the end of the dollar amount than Allbirds is in its new incarnation. If you want to go a little smaller there\u2019s Oracle. That business only has a market cap of $500 billion, so that\u2019s one fewer zero for Allbirds to claw back.<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s not just the enormous financial disparity that should make would-be backers of Allbirds as an AI company hesitant. All of these big players have decades of experience in tech behind them and have built the knowledge internally required to succeed in this aspect of AI.<\/p>\n

They have the customers already, along with the best staff by and large, and the relationships required with partners to destroy Allbirds, even if the fight was fiscally even. Going into the AI sector was a terrible idea. Going into this part of the AI sector is one devoid of imagination and reeks of the lack of market knowledge you might expect from a direct-to-consumer shoe company, let alone a failed one.<\/p>\n

Allbirds, or NewBird AI, is less capable of succeeding in this market than I am of beating Daniel Wiffen in the pool. The signs of a dead cat bounce are already there. At the time of writing, the share price was back to $7 and the market cap at $61 million. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably for the best. I can\u2019t even swim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019m sorry Daniel Wiffen, but your days are numbered. After more than two decades in technology journalism, I\u2019ve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,115942,18,19,17,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-461014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-daniel-wiffen","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116492477748649812","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}