The CEO of Allbirds’ new AI biz has a plan, but no employees

Carlsten says she doesn’t need big chip commitments to realize Smartbird’s vision, because her potential customers needs sit in the range of hundreds to thousands of chips—it’s “not about large scales and huge numbers of GPUs, they’re more about agility of these clusters, and more about having control of the infrastructure stack.”

Smartbird is also unlikely to compete with rivals on price, since cloud services go to great lengths to optimize chip usage 24 hours a day to offer the cheapest compute, though Carlsten suspects that companies with specialized workflows will be able to work more efficiently with their own servers.

Demand for AI infrastructure is a powerful force in the market, driving up the stock prices for chipmakers, cloud providers, and energy companies, even convincing investors that orbital data centers are a feasible idea. But Carlsten insists that Allbird’s transition was carefully thought through.

“It wasn’t, ‘Let’s just do AI, because it’s AI, and it’s hot,'” Carlsten, who will be paid a $700,000 annual salary and was awarded stock worth about $9 million to take the job, said. “It was really about, do we have a chance to build a business over time that is going to find this niche in the market and be able to grow over time?”

When Allbirds pivoted, one thing that went by the wayside was its public benefit corporation status, which had been intended to enshrine the sustainability commitments that were part of the shoe company’s pitch. PBC charters are often used by companies to highlight non-financial promises. OpenAI, for example, is a PBC with a focus on AI safety. This change of direction, however, suggests PBCs are hardly ironclad.

Carlsten said that Smartbird’s board made a long-term commitment to execute against her AI strategy.

“There are some companies out there chasing AI,” she told TechCrunch,” but at the end of the day, what matters is, is there actual weight behind the chasing?”