A shoe company just pivoted to AI infrastructure

Allbirds made woolly shoes. You might have seen them on the feet of Silicon Valley founders who wanted to look casual in board meetings.

This week, the company announced it is pivoting to AI infrastructure. It is renaming itself NewBird AI. Its plan is to acquire GPU assets and rent them out to AI companies. The stock jumped over 600%.

This is the same company that was valued at $4 billion when it went public in 2021. Weeks before the pivot, it closed its US stores and sold its intellectual property for $39 million.

Allbirds has zero experience in AI. No technical team. No infrastructure background. It is now competing against companies backed by billions to buy and operate GPU hardware.

That is how far some companies are willing to go.

You do not need to go that far

You do not need to abandon your business model. You do not need to rename your company. You do not need to start leasing GPUs.

But here is the question worth sitting with.

If a shoe company is prepared to rebuild itself entirely around AI, what does it say that your team still has not set up an AI workspace?

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, said that every company will become an AI company. He was not talking about companies abandoning what they do. He meant companies weaving AI into how they already work.

There is a big gap between pivoting your entire business and doing nothing at all. Most UK businesses are still closer to the nothing end than they realise.

The first step is smaller than you think

You do not need a strategy document. You do not need a twelve-month roadmap. You need an AI workspace and people who know how to use it.

That means setting up a platform. ChatGPT Business, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot. Pick one. Get your team onto it.

Then train them. Not a one-hour webinar. Proper, structured training that builds confidence and gives people permission to use AI on real work.

AI adoption is 80% people and culture, 20% technology. The platform takes a day to set up. Getting your team to trust it and use it well takes longer. That is where the value sits.

Start with the boring questions. Where do your people spend time on repetitive tasks? Where do bottlenecks slow decisions down? Where does information get stuck between systems?

Those questions do not require a company pivot. They require a conversation with your team and an afternoon with an AI workspace.

Your business is the advantage

The irony of the Allbirds story is that they walked away from the thing that matters most: domain expertise.

Your understanding of your customers, your sector, your operations; that is what makes AI useful. AI does not replace business knowledge. It makes it go further.

A 30-person professional services firm that trains its people on AI will find efficiency gains within weeks. Not because the technology is magic. Because the people already know where the problems are. AI gives them a faster way to solve them.

A company that throws away its entire identity to chase a trend has none of that. It starts from zero in a market full of companies that have been building for years.

You already have something valuable. The job is to make it work harder, not replace it.

Where to start

If you have read this far and recognised that your business sits closer to the nothing end of the spectrum, the fix is not complicated.

Get an AI workspace. Train your people. Start applying it to the work you already do.

gecco helps UK SMEs do exactly that. If you want to take the first step, visit geccohq.webflow.io/adopt/ai/today for practical guidance on getting started.