Brisk It's $399 AI grill wants to fix your backyard BBQ mistakes

BBQ purists love to say that great brisket requires hours of watching the fire and suffering in the smoke. Brisk It clearly disagrees, and it wants to prove that an algorithm can handle the pitmaster duties for cheap.

At CES 2025, the company officially unveiled the Zelos 450, a compact smart pellet grill priced at just $399. Following up on its high-end Origin lineup from last year, Brisk It is now taking its generative AI platform and stuffing it into a budget-friendly backyard cooker.

Stripping the bells and whistles for $399

To hit that aggressive $399 price point, Brisk It had to make some compromises on the hardware.

The Zelos 450 swaps out the fancy onboard screens and premium controllers seen on the Origin series for a much simpler physical dial and display. But the fundamentals are still there.

You get 450 square inches of cooking space, full Wi-Fi connectivity for remote monitoring, and a temperature range stretching from 180 degrees Fahrenheit for low-and-slow smoking up to 500 degrees for high-heat searing. Brisk It also hinted that a larger size might be coming down the line.

An AI sous chef in your pocket

The real secret sauce here is the upgraded Vera 2.0 generative AI platform. Instead of just following preset timers, Vera now uses your phone's camera to figure out what to cook.

You can snap a photo of whatever is in your fridge or your shopping cart, and the system will whip up a custom recipe. It can even analyze a picture of a finished plate to replicate the dish, and then automatically sync every temperature step straight to the grill.

Brisk It claims the system is even smart enough to correct user mistakes. If you forget to baste your prime rib roast on schedule, the grill will adjust its heat curve on the fly to keep the meat from drying out.

The Zelos 450 is scheduled to ship in Q1 2025 through Amazon, Home Depot, Walmart, Lowes, and directly from Brisk It.

Why it matters

We think Brisk It is pulling off one of the smartest applications of generative AI in consumer hardware so far.

Most smart appliances slap a chatbot onto a screen just to say they have AI. Smoking meat, however, is notoriously intimidating because one mistake over a twelve-hour cook can ruin an expensive cut of meat. By combining automated temperature profiles with real-time error compensation, Brisk It directly solves the anxiety that keeps casual cooks away from pellet grills.

At $399, this machine also puts serious pressure on legacy brands like Traeger. High-end smart grills often hover near the thousand-dollar mark, making advanced pellet cooking an expensive hobby. Dropping that entry bar will force the entire outdoor cooking market to step up its software game.

That said, heavy reliance on cloud software and phone cameras always carries risks. If the companion app is glitchy or your backyard Wi-Fi drops, the bare-bones physical controls on the grill might leave you stranded. But for anyone who wants authentic weekend brisket without waking up at 4 AM to tend wood pellets, this looks like one of the most exciting kitchen tech releases of the year.