Dan Ives, Wedbush Securities’ resident tech bull, just dropped a thesis that might actually make sense in the AI chaos: forget the flashy language models everyone’s obsessing over. The real winners? Companies that help enterprises actually *use* their data.
Here’s the thing—everyone’s been chasing ChatGPT knockoffs and LLM hype, but Ives reckons that’s about to get commoditized faster than you can say “open-source model.” The actual money is in the data layer: the infrastructure that turns a company’s messy, internal data into something an AI can actually learn from and act on.
“Enterprise data is the decisive constraint and monetization unlock,” Ives wrote. Translation: if you can’t feed your AI good data, your AI is basically useless. And the companies that solve that problem? They’re about to print money.
**Palantir Technologies** is the poster child here. Yeah, it’s down 22% this year—rough look. But Ives sees it as the textbook example of what he’s talking about. Palantir’s whole thing is turning massive datasets into actionable intelligence for businesses and government. Their AI platform (AIP) is seeing “unprecedented demand,” especially in commercial and federal spaces. Shorter sales cycles, bigger deals, faster ROI. That’s the dream.
**Snowflake** is the dark horse. While everyone’s hyping up the obvious AI plays, Snowflake’s quietly positioned itself as the Switzerland of AI platforms—you can swap between OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, or open-source models without rebuilding your entire data pipeline. That flexibility is going to matter *a lot* when the AI landscape keeps shifting.
**Salesforce** is betting big on this too, with its Agentforce platform. CEO Marc Benioff even floated renaming the whole company after it. With 150,000 existing customers, Salesforce can turn AI from a threat into its biggest revenue driver. That’s a massive advantage when you’ve already got people paying you.
**MongoDB** had a rough 2026, but Ives still sees it as a winner. Tons of companies are stuck with 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 picks for a later-year rally.
Finally, **Innodata** is the overachiever—up 98% year-to-date. It’s basically the data janitor of AI: refining and processing information so companies can actually learn from it. As AI moves from text to multimodal to autonomous systems, someone’s gotta handle the specialized data engineering. That someone is Innodata.
The bottom line? The AI boom isn’t over. It’s just shifting from “build the fanciest model” to “build the infrastructure that makes models actually work.” These five stocks are positioned to win that next chapter.
