Look, everyone’s been obsessed with the flashy AI stuff—ChatGPT, Claude, all those large language models that can write your emails for you. But here’s the thing: Dan Ives, one of Wall Street’s biggest tech bulls, just dropped some knowledge that most people are sleeping on. The real money in AI isn’t in the models themselves. It’s in the data layer.
Think of it like this: LLMs are becoming the commodity. They’re getting cheaper, more accessible, and honestly, less differentiated by the day. But you know what’s actually scarce and valuable? Clean, organized, actionable data. That’s the constraint. That’s the unlock. And Ives thinks a handful of companies are perfectly positioned to dominate this next chapter.
Palantir: The Comeback Kid
Palantir’s had a rough 2026, down 22% year-to-date. But Ives sees it as the poster child for this shift. The company’s AIP platform turns messy enterprise data into actual insights that solve real problems. We’re talking shorter sales cycles, bigger deal sizes, and faster ROI. That’s the kind of stuff that makes CFOs actually approve budgets.
Snowflake: The Underrated Player
Snowflake doesn’t get the hype of the mega-cap AI darlings, but Ives thinks that’s a mistake. Here’s why: their platform lets you switch between different AI models without rebuilding your entire data infrastructure. You can rotate from OpenAI to Anthropic to open-source models without blowing up your pipelines. That flexibility is gold in a market where nobody knows which AI model will be the winner.
Salesforce: The Agentforce Bet
Marc Benioff literally floated renaming the company Agentforce. That’s how serious they are about their AI agent platform. With 150,000 customers already in the ecosystem, Salesforce can turn AI from a threat into a monetization machine. Ives thinks the total addressable market here is massive.
MongoDB: The Database Play
MongoDB’s had a rough year too, but Ives sees it as a winner in the next wave. A lot of companies still have legacy databases that can’t handle modern AI workloads. MongoDB helps them bridge that gap. Bank of America agrees—they just added it to their top software stock picks.
Innodata: The Dark Horse
This one’s already up 98% year-to-date, so maybe you’ve already heard about it. But Innodata’s data engineering and processing capabilities are becoming increasingly critical as AI moves from text to multimodal to autonomous systems. They’re basically the plumbing that makes everything else work.
The Bottom Line
The AI boom isn’t over. It’s just shifting. The companies that own the data layer—the infrastructure that turns raw information into competitive advantage—are going to be the real winners. Ives is betting on these five. Whether you follow him or not, at least now you know where to look.
