It’s perhaps unsurprising which S&P 500 component was the most vocal about artificial intelligence this earnings season.
That honor belongs to Nvidia Corp.
NVDA,
which has seen its shares explode 192% higher on the year amid Wall Street’s hunt for AI beneficiaries. The topic of AI came up 104 times on Nvidia’s most recent earnings call, between analyst questions and management commentary, as executives emphasized that the AI rush is set to translate quickly into serious revenue for the company.
But some of the other companies that talked up AI to great degrees are more unexpected. Take Cadence Design Systems Inc.
CDNS,
which ranked third for AI conference-call mentions this cycle in a screen of S&P 500
SPX,
components done through AlphaSense/Sentieo.
Cadence’s April 24 call racked up 66 AI mentions, heavier volume than what was heard on the calls of Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
GOOGL,
Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
or Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
companies that likely are more top of mind when investors think about the current AI frenzy. Cadence operates in the field of electronic design automation and helps with software and hardware designs for chips.
“Generative AI design tools are revolutionizing chip and system development by delivering unprecedented optimization and productivity benefits,” Chief Executive Anirudh Devgan said early on Cadence’s earnings call. “Customers have already been benefiting from our groundbreaking generative AI solutions in the digital verification and system areas.”
Cadence’s AI offerings are expected to drive “material customer design productivity improvements” and help the company capture a greater portion of its customers’ research and development budgets, Rosenblatt Securities analyst Blair Abernathy noted after the report.
Shares of Cadence have risen 47% so far this year and easily outpaced the S&P 500’s 15% increase over that span, though the stock hasn’t seen the same magnitude of gains as Nvidia (up 192%) and Salesforce Inc.
CRM,
(up 60%), the only two companies that generated more conference-call mentions of AI so far this cycle.
Alphabet ranked fourth with 65 mentions, which isn’t a shock. While Wall Street now has come to better appreciate the company’s many years of AI development and ability to capitalize on the current wave of interest in the technology, the Google parent company spent the earlier part of this year trying to reassure investors of its positioning after Microsoft got a boost in the court of public opinion from its investment in ChatGPT operator OpenAI.
See also: This Alphabet bull is feeling more upbeat about Google’s story
Chief Executive Sundar Pichai wasted no time getting into an AI discussion on the company’s April 25 earnings call, mentioning the technology in the second sentence of his prepared remarks, one of 65 mentions of AI that came up on the call.
He later called out the “incredible AI opportunity for consumers, our partners and for our business,” saying that the technology can help the company’s search, cloud and advertising products, among others.
‘An unmatched business model’: Why Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square spent $1 billion on Alphabet stock
Next up was Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.
HPE,
which has seen its stock rise 25% over the past month but only record 10% gains on a year-to-date basis. AI came up 57 times on the May 30 HPE call.
“HPE is winning in AI because we deliver an end-to-end portfolio designed for the full spectrum of enterprise AI workloads and use cases, spanning large-scale model development, training and inferencing,” Chief Executive Antonio Neri said. The company’s AI business was one that saw “particularly standout growth” even as it was “somewhat impacted by customer acceptance of certain large deals,” he noted.
Read more: HP and HPE look to AI for future growth as legacy businesses cool
Behind HPE in terms of AI chatter were Meta (57 mentions), Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
AMD,
(56 mentions) and Microsoft (53 mentions), all names highly associated with AI trends by this point. AI came up 51 times on Broadcom Inc.’s
AVGO,
call, though some of those mentions came from analysts wondering whether AI spending was “boxing out” more traditional categories, or if budgets would simply grow.
Read: AMD is becoming ‘closest competitor’ to Nvidia in AI hardware, and that could extend stock’s rally
Arista Networks Inc.
ANET,
rounded out the top 10 with 47 AI mentions. “Cloud customers are resonating with our AI and switching strategy for platforms. Presently, we are in the midst of trials, leading to production deployments this year in 2023,” Chief Executive Jayshree Ullal said on the earnings call. She expects AI networking “to become meaningful throughout the years and through the decade ahead.”
Just outside the top 10 were some more unlikely suspects, including tax-preparation and small-business software giant Intuit Inc.
INTU,
whose May 23 call mentioned the topic of AI 34 times. That was just ahead of the number of conference-call mentions for Adobe Inc.
ADBE,
widely viewed as an AI play thanks to the potential for generative AI to impact the creative process.
Read: Adobe earnings help justify AI-fueled surge, but will the stock now ‘take a breather’?
But Intuit sees plenty of opportunities to deploy AI further through its own business, with Chief Executive Sasan Goodarzi saying that the company was poised “to lead through this technological shift” due to four years of past technological investment in AI.
The company owns Mailchimp, and AI there helps customers “create faster e-mail campaigns based on industry, marketing intent and brand voice,” he continued. Further, AI can help “deliver insights to help you manage your cash flow, to help you grow your customers” within QuickBooks, another Intuit product.
Don’t miss: Yes, AI is coming for your job. Here’s how to prepare.
Another potentially surprising name that talked up AI in a big way was Nasdaq Inc.
NDAQ,
AI came up 31 times on the exchange operator’s earnings call.
“While we’re just beginning the process of evaluating specific ideas for the use of generative AI in our products and across our business operations, we see compelling opportunities to lever broader AI models, including deep reinforcement learning, predictive control and computer vision across our business divisions to support our strategic efforts to enhance the liquidity, transparency and integrity of the financial ecosystem,” Chief Executive Adena Friedman said.
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