C3.ai is capturing strong demand for commercial AI solutions with tools to improve productivity and operational efficiency. BigBear.ai has carved out a niche supporting mission-critical intelligence for the defense sector while moving forward with a unique focus on vision-enabled AI.

Countless companies stand to benefit from AI, but these stocks have AI and automation as a central part of their businesses.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been the hottest sector on Wall Street for more than two years. First up is IonQ (NYSE: IONQ). As of this writing, shares of IonQ are up more than 275% over the past 12 months.

Artificial intelligence (AI) investing experienced a shakeup at the end of January with the release of DeepSeek's R1 model. This model was reported to have been trained far more cheaply than its U.S. counterparts and performed similarly in some areas. This caused a short-term panic in some AI stocks, but some have recovered.