Here’s the thing about the AI boom: everyone’s obsessed with the flashy stuff—the big language models, the ChatGPT drama, the “AI will replace your job” headlines. But according to Dan Ives, one of Wall Street’s most bullish tech analysts, the real action is happening somewhere way less sexy: the data layer.
Think of it like this: LLMs are becoming the commodity. They’re getting cheaper, more accessible, and honestly, kind of boring. The actual money? That’s in helping companies figure out what to do with all their messy, internal data. It’s the difference between owning a hammer and knowing how to build a house.
Ives from Wedbush Securities laid out his thesis pretty clearly: enterprise data is the next frontier, and it’s going to create a whole new class of winners. Here are his top five picks for the next chapter of the AI story.
**Palantir Technologies (PLTR)** has 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 helps businesses turn their sprawling data into actual insights—and apparently, enterprises can’t get enough of it. Shorter sales cycles, bigger deals, faster ROI. That’s the dream.
**Snowflake (SNOW)** is the quiet overachiever nobody talks about. While everyone’s arguing about which AI model is best, Snowflake lets companies switch between them without rebuilding their entire data infrastructure. It’s like having a universal adapter for your AI stack. Boring? Maybe. Valuable? Absolutely.
**Salesforce (CRM)** is betting big on Agentforce, its AI agent platform. CEO Marc Benioff even joked about renaming the whole company after it. With 150,000 existing customers, Salesforce has a massive installed base to upsell. Ives thinks this transforms AI from a threat into the company’s biggest money-maker.
**MongoDB (MDB)** has also struggled this year, but here’s the angle: tons of companies still have ancient 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 for a later 2026 rally.
**Innodata (INOD)** is the outlier here—it’s actually up 98% year-to-date. The company specializes in data engineering and processing, which is increasingly critical as AI moves from text to multi-modal to autonomous systems. As AI gets weirder and more complex, Innodata’s expertise becomes more valuable.
The common thread? All five companies are solving the same problem: helping enterprises actually use their data in the AI era. It’s not glamorous, but it’s where the money is. And if Ives is right, these stocks could be the real winners while everyone else is still arguing about which chatbot is smarter.
