In a stunning pivot that industry analysts are calling “the natural next step for people who used to sell wool sneakers,” Allbirds Inc. announced this week that it will immediately cease all resemblance to a footwear company and rebrand as NewBird AI, a fully integrated buzzword generator and GPU-as-a-Service provider.

The company’s stock, which has spent the last three years cosplaying as a ski slope, surged 600% in a single afternoon after CEO Joe Vernachio revealed that the firm would now “synergistically leverage proprietary cloud synergies and other words we just Googled” to disrupt the AI sector. Shares continued to rise after Vernachio demonstrated a sample AI product, which generated entirely synthetic pairs of shoes that will never be manufactured, sold, or touched by a human foot.

“We realized there was more margin in pretending to have AI than actually making shoes,” said Vernachio, casually flicking a discarded shoelace into a recycling bin marked ‘Legacy Business.’ “Our investors are excited to see us finally fulfill the dream of every American business: never making anything tangible ever again.”

Financial markets responded with characteristic enthusiasm for anything mentioning AI. Drew Haskins, an analyst with the firm Quantum Leap Partners, commented, “As far as I can tell, their business model is now: ‘Raise $50 million, say GPU a lot, and profit.’ Frankly, that’s more substance than most AI companies we cover.”

When asked about plans for its old shoe inventory, NewBird AI’s Chief Innovation Officer announced they “intend to spin off the footwear arm into a decentralized blockchain for toes, pending regulatory approval.”

At press time, the company’s new headquarters reportedly consisted of a single MacBook Pro in the back of a shuttered mall kiosk, running ChatGPT and a screensaver that says ‘Disrupting Everything.’