Microsoft, Meta among leaders in monetizing GenAI heading into 2025: Mizuho

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Meta (NASDAQ:META) and a slate of other big tech names look to lead in monetizing generative artificial intelligence heading into 2025, according to an in-depth report by Mizuho.

“While GenAI is still in nascent stages of transforming business processes at scale, following a somewhat slow beginning to 2024 we have seen more notable progress towards enterprise adoption over the past few months,” Mizuho analysts, led by Gregg Moskowitz, said in the report.

“Customers in various sectors are exploring the use of GenAI for a variety tasks, be it automating software development through AI-driven code generation, optimizing marketing strategies with high-quality customized content, or enhancing user experiences through conversational AI applications,” he added.

Companies that have invested the most in internal research and development of AI will have a crucial role in leading GenAI. On this list, Mizuho includes Microsoft, Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL), Meta, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Oracle (NYSE:ORCL). Unsurprisingly, all these stocks have Outperform ratings.

For software firms who stand to gain the most from GenAI, Mizuho includes Microsoft, ServiceNow (NOW), Salesforce (CRM), Adobe (ADBE), Palantir (PLTR), GitLab (GTLB), Snowflake (SNOW), Cloudflare (NET), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), CrowdStrike (CRWD), Zscaler (ZS), Atlassian (TEAM), MongoDB (MDB), Oracle, NICE (NICE), Five9 (FIVN) and Zoom (ZM).

The GenAI market also appears to be shifting from co-pilot solutions to agents.

“Over just the last few months, the market has shifted from copilot-centric solutions to Agentic AI,” said Moskowitz. “Agentic AI, which utilizes sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to help individuals solve complex, multi-step problems in an automated fashion, has created a great deal of buzz in recent months, with a number of industry experts referring to this emerging technology as the ‘next wave of artificial intelligence.'”

“More specifically, AI agents gather and process data from a variety of data sources (such as sensors and databases), with LLMs effectively serving as the orchestration and reasoning layer for this technology,” he added.

Salesforce and Palantir are two of the early leaders in agentic AI.