SAN FRANCISCO — Morris’s Delicatessen, a beloved 47-year-old sandwich shop in the Mission District, has announced a dramatic pivot to artificial intelligence, despite having no technical infrastructure, no engineering staff, and a business model that has historically revolved around selling corned beef on rye.

“We’re very excited to announce that Morris’s Deli is now Morris’s AI,” said founder and longtime sandwich artist Morris Greenbaum, 71, while struggling to read from a crumpled piece of paper with “PIVOT TO AI” written in crayon. “Our award-winning pastrami is now… powered by machine learning? Is that right? That’s what the venture capital people told me to say.”

The pivot reportedly came after Greenbaum attended a neighborhood association meeting where a tech entrepreneur explained that “AI is eating the world.” Greenbaum, who had previously only understood eating in the context of his customers consuming Reubens, took the phrase literally.

“He said AI was eating everything, and I thought, well, we know a thing or two about eating around here,” Greenbaum explained, gesturing to the ancient meat slicer that serves as the establishment’s most advanced piece of technology. “So I called my nephew who works with computers, and he said something about ‘machine learning,’ and now we’re an AI company.”

The transformation has confused both longtime customers and industry analysts alike.

“I came in for a turkey club and the owner kept asking me about my ‘use case,’” reported customer Linda Hawkins, 58. “Then he tried to explain that the pickles were now ‘algorithmically optimized.’ They tasted exactly the same. I think he just moved them to the left side of the plate.”

Remarkably, the pivot has attracted significant investor interest.

“When we heard that a 47-year-old sandwich shop was getting into AI, we knew this was the authentic disruption we’d been looking for,” said venture capitalist Brad Morrison, whose firm has offered Morris’s a $50 million Series A. “Most AI companies are founded by Stanford PhDs. This one is founded by a man who doesn’t know how to turn on a computer. That’s exactly the kind of outside-the-box thinking this industry needs.”

The investment terms reportedly include a stipulation that Greenbaum must include the word “neural” in at least three menu items.

“We’ve already renamed the house salad to the ‘Neural Network Salad,’” Greenbaum noted. “And the soup of the day is now the ‘Soup of the Day, Powered by Artificial Intelligence.’ It’s still just chicken noodle. My wife makes it in the back. But now it’s AI chicken noodle.”

When asked what specific AI capabilities the company would develop, Greenbaum stared blankly for several seconds before responding, “I’ve been putting extra mayo on sandwiches for 47 years based on how the customer looks at me. If that’s not artificial intelligence, I don’t know what is.”

The company’s stock, which does not exist, is reportedly up 400% in pre-market trading.