Best AI Stocks to Buy: Smart Artificial Intelligence Investments
Artificial intelligence is the catalyst for what many observers recognize as a fourth industrial revolution. Here are the best AI stocks to buy right now.
Karee Venema
Here's one perspective on why investors should have the best AI stocks on their radar: Amazon.com (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy recently called artificial intelligence "the most significant technological transformation since the internet."
Jassy highlighted its sweeping potential to reshape how we live, work and interact across virtually every industry. This potential is reflected in analysts' financial estimates for the still-nascent industry.
According to IDC, global spending on AI is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29.0% from $307 billion in 2025 to $632 billion by 2028. Businesses around the world are expected to invest more than $202 billion in generative AI by 2028, up from $69.1 billion in 2025.
Adoption is accelerating, too, with 88% of respondents to the 2025 McKinsey state-of-AI survey saying their organizations are using the technology in at least one business function,, up from 78% in the 2024 iteration.
From streamlining customer service to automating coding and supercharging data analysis, AI is becoming a core part of business operations.
Of course, AI's rapid ascent isn't without challenges and risks. Accuracy remains a persistent issue. AI systems can generate incorrect or misleading information.
And training and running powerful AI models doesn't come cheap. It takes an enormous amount of electricity and relies heavily on cutting-edge chips, many of which are produced by just a handful of suppliers.
That's good for semiconductor stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA). But these kinds of dependencies can lead to major bottlenecks, whether hardware shortages or rising infrastructure costs.
Markets have questioned ever-expanding capex budgets for so-called hyperscalers, with their spending set to rise by 60% in 2026 to as much as $750 billion, with little return on investment to show so far.
But the big picture is hard to ignore. For investors willing to take the long view, AI still stands out as one of the most compelling opportunities in the market today.
Here are five companies especially well-positioned to ride a long wave of AI-driven growth.
Data is as of May 12. Dividend yields are calculated by annualizing the most recent payout and dividing by the share price.
Salesforce
- Market value: $158.1 billion
- Dividend yield: 1.0%
About a year and a half ago, Salesforce (CRM) launched Agentforce, a platform for building and deploying AI agents. These are sophisticated systems that operate autonomously to manage tasks like qualifying leads or resolving customer inquiries.
Agentforce has certainly seen rapid adoption, attracting about 18,500 deals and approximately 9,500 paying customers as of December 2025, spanning industries such as manufacturing, financial services, technology and healthcare.
"Agentforce has been able to deliver significant ROI in some initial use cases because they utilize pre-built integrations and low-code tools, which reduce implementation costs by at least 20% compared to custom-built AI systems," said Keith Kirkpatrick, a research director at Futurum.
"Based on Futurum research, along with my own conversations with Salesforce executives," Kirkpatrick writes, "it's clear that the company is actively seeking ways to reduce the initial effort to get started with agents and drive ROI quickly, as they realize that quick wins are the key to instilling confidence in an agentic platform or system."
The research firm Valoir found that Agentforce was 16 times faster than DIY approaches and accuracy increased by 75%. Consider the case with OpenTable. Within three weeks of rolling out Agentforce, the system was able to manage 73% of all restaurant queries. This was a 50% increase from its prior tool.
With more than 150,000 customers globally, Salesforce has many opportunities to monetize Agentforce.
Salesforce is already the market leader in cloud-based CRM solutions, according to Stifel analysts J. Parker Lane and Jack McShane, and its Customer 360 platform and Agentforce will drive further penetration.
"Management has emphasized durable growth in recent years as the company scales and matures, and we believe the combination of HSD/LDD growth, healthy margin expansion, and conscious capital allocation makes the name attractive to investors." Lane and McShane have a Buy rating and a $250 12-month target price on the stock.
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ServiceNow
- Market value: $91.8 billion
- Dividend yield: N/A
Its core technology – which is about optimizing and automating processes and workflows – is not particularly exciting. But ServiceNow (NOW) provides crucial systems for businesses that want to realize more efficiencies and lower costs across departments like IT, HR and customer service.
This technology has also proven to be a natural fit for AI. For example, ServiceNow's Now Assist platform allows IT teams to automatically detect and resolve incidents before they escalate.
In finance departments, AI helps streamline routine approvals and reconcile discrepancies with minimal human input. And HR teams benefit from AI-generated responses to common employee questions, freeing up staff for higher-value tasks.
Meanwhile, developers can accelerate software delivery using AI-assisted test generation and workflow automation.
ServiceNow surpassed $600 million in annual contract value (ACV) for Now Assist in 2025. As of the first quarter of 2026, was tracking beyond $750 million, and management upped its full-year guidance from $1 billion to $1.5 billion.
ServiceNow has also been investing heavily in AI agents for CRM, HR, IT and other categories such as an AI Agent Studio for building customized systems and the AI Agent Orchestrator for using teams of specialized agents. And prevailing economic uncertainty appears to be driving more adoption of AI solutions.
"Since our founding," CEO Bill McDermott said in a statement about ServiceNow's recent results, "we've built our platform around the work customers need to accomplish. Today, they rely on ServiceNow to be their AI control tower for business reinvention. Customers trust our platform because we integrate with any model, cloud, interface, data, and system they choose to deploy."
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Microsoft
- Market value: $3.0 trillion
- Dividend yield: 0.9%
Back in 2019, Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella made a bold move by investing $1 billion in OpenAI – a partnership that, at the time, raised eyebrows.
Today, it looks nothing short of visionary.
This early commitment, followed by deeper funding and technical integration, gave Microsoft a front-row seat to the generative AI revolution. It also provided a strategic boost to Azure, positioning it as the cloud of choice for a growing wave of AI-powered workloads.
Since then, Microsoft has built aggressively on that foundation. AI capabilities are now deeply embedded across its product ecosystem – from cloud infrastructure and developer tools to business apps and customer service platforms.
Microsoft's Foundry is used by developers at over 80,000 companies to design, customize and manage AI agents. And more than 10,000 organizations are using its Foundry Agent Service to build and scale specialized AI agents.
GitHub Copilot has become a cornerstone of developer productivity. It's no longer just a code-completion tool; with features like agent mode, Autofix, and Code Review, it now helps detect bugs, suggest improvements, even remediate vulnerabilities automatically. As of early 2026 Microsoft's Copilot had more than 150 million monthly active users.
And it's not just developers. Across Microsoft 365 and Power Platform, AI agents are being used to automate workflows in HR, sales, customer service and finance. More than 230,000 organizations – including 90% of the Fortune 500 – have built custom AI tools using Copilot Studio, creating more than 1 million agents last quarter alone.
Even gaming is getting the AI treatment, with Copilot for Gaming offering in-game coaching and real-time assistance.
Microsoft's early AI investments didn't just buy it a seat at the table. They let it write the playbook.
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Snowflake
- Market value: $52.6 billion
- Dividend yield: N/A
Snowflake (SNOW) built its database platform for the cloud from the ground up, which means it's well-suited for modern data and AI workloads and enjoys a critical advantage.
Legacy systems were never designed to support the scale and complexity of today’s AI applications. Snowflake's architecture, by contrast, makes it easy to store, manage and analyze massive datasets with built-in security and governance.
Snowflake is fast becoming the go-to platform for enterprise AI. More than 5,000 companies now use its AI and machine-learning tools weekly. Its Cortex framework lets customers build intelligent data agents powered by top-tier models like OpenAI and Anthropic – all without moving data off-platform.
Recent integrations with Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams bring these capabilities directly into daily workflows, expanding reach and stickiness.
AstraZeneca, for example, uses Snowflake to unify and manage research data across its organization, making it AI-ready and enabling faster drug discovery and clinical development. It's a powerful case study of how Snowflake's data infrastructure can help industries unlock the full potential of AI.
Snowflake continues to deliver strong results. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, management reported product revenue of $1.23 billion, marking a 30% year-over-year increase. The net revenue retention rate stood at 125%, and the company now serves 790 of the Forbes Global 2000, up 5% from a year ago.
With remaining performance obligations up 42% to $9.8 billion, Snowflake's growth trajectory underscores its expanding role in the AI market.
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Meta Platforms
- Market value: $1.5 trillion
- Dividend yield: 0.4%
Meta Platforms (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn't always been ahead of the curve. He was late to embrace mobile, and he made a costly, overambitious bet on the metaverse.
But if there's one thing he has proven, it's an ability to adapt and pivot. This has certainly been evident in the company's evolving AI strategy. It's as broad and compelling as it is expensive, and it positions AI as the core engine of Meta's long-term growth.
At the top of the list is advertising. Meta aims to simplify ad-buying for businesses by allowing them to specify a goal and a price per result, then letting AI handle the rest. Already, Meta's algorithms outperform many advertisers in audience targeting and are now generating more compelling ad creatives, too.
The second focus is user engagement. AI-driven content recommendations have boosted time spent on Meta's platforms, including 7% on Facebook and 6% on Instagram.
Meta is eyeing business messaging as its next big revenue stream. With WhatsApp engaging 3.3 billion monthly users and Instagram and Messenger seeing message volumes surge, Meta envisions every business eventually having an AI agent – akin to today's websites or social profiles – for customer service and sales.
Finally, the company is pushing to make Meta AI a household name. With nearly a billion users already engaging monthly, Meta is enhancing personalization, entertainment, and voice features.
Meta is rapidly transforming into an AI company. And in doing so, it's leveraging its most valuable asset: its massive user base.
This kind of scale could give Meta a powerful edge as AI becomes more deeply embedded in the way we connect, consume and do business online.
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