Remember when everyone thought AI would destroy the world? Well, William Blair’s analysts decided to stop panicking and actually think about which companies would survive the robot apocalypse. Spoiler alert: not all of them will.
The investment firm basically threw out their old playbook for rating AI stocks and built a new one from scratch. Their reasoning? “Against a backdrop where AI changes everything, shouldn’t we change the lens through which we evaluate the companies under our coverage?” Fair point. So they created a four-part test to separate the AI winners from the soon-to-be-forgotten also-rans.
Here’s what they’re looking at: Can the company actually execute? Do they have defensible moats that AI can’t just bulldoze through? Is their pricing model built for the AI era, or are they still charging per seat like it’s 2015? And most importantly—is AI actually making them money, or just making them nervous?
Using a 20-point scoring system, William Blair ranked their entire AI coverage universe. Nobody got a perfect score (because apparently perfection is dead), but a few came really close.
The Winners’ Circle
Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) took the crown with 19 out of 20. The storage and data management company basically aced everything except pricing—which, honestly, is a pretty good problem to have. DigitalOcean matched that score, losing just one point on execution. These two are positioned to thrive because they’re not just riding the AI hype train; they’re actually building the infrastructure that makes AI work.
Snowflake, MongoDB, Rubrik, Microsoft, and JFrog all scored 16-17 points and made the “outperform” list. Microsoft’s interesting here—it got perfect marks for execution and defensibility but got dinged for pricing and revenue acceleration. Translation: they’re great at what they do, but investors are still waiting to see if AI actually moves the needle on their bottom line.
The Casualties
Then there’s the underperform crew. Backblaze, N-able, GitLab, and Dropbox all scored 10 or below. Dropbox hit rock bottom with an 8—the analysts basically said the company’s got structural problems, execution issues, and AI tools that haven’t proven themselves. Ouch.
The common thread among the losers? They’re either too exposed to disruption risk, stuck with outdated seat-based pricing models, or haven’t shown that AI is actually accelerating their growth. In other words, they’re betting on AI to save them, but the market’s not convinced.
The Takeaway
This isn’t just about picking winners and losers—it’s about recognizing that the AI era demands a different kind of company. The winners have defensible positions, flexible pricing, and actual revenue acceleration. The losers are hoping AI will fix their problems instead of building companies that AI can’t touch. If you’re looking at AI stocks, William Blair’s framework is basically asking: Is this company built for the future, or just hoping the future works out?
