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Alphabet has become a dominant AI powerhouse with massive scale.
Microsoft has solidified its position as an enterprise AI leader by building a comprehensive AI ecosystem.
ServiceNow is seeing rapid adoption for its AI-powered Now Assist product suite and agentic AI platform.
After witnessing a sharp correction in early 2025, the U.S. stock market has surged to record highs on the back of stellar second-quarter earnings performance. Many artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technology companies are posting solid growth numbers, while analysts are expecting the AI tailwind to drive growth for several more years.
Here are three companies with sustainable competitive advantages that are well-positioned to ride the AI wave in the long term.
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Technology giant Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) boasts strong financials and expanding AI capabilities. The company delivered impressive performance in the second quarter of 2025, with revenue growing 14% year over year to $96.4 billion, while also maintaining healthy operating margins.
Alphabet's AI offerings are being rapidly adopted worldwide. Alphabet's Gemini chatbot notched over 450 million monthly active users while daily requests on the app also rose over 50% sequentially in the second quarter. Gemini processed over 980 trillion monthly tokens -- the basic unit for processing information as input and output -- in June 2025, which was nearly double that of the previous month.
The company also counts more than 2 billion monthly users of its AI Overviews search feature across more than 200 countries. This, in turn, is helping improve search engagement and query volume for the company's search business.
Google Cloud is also becoming a significant growth catalyst, and reported a 32% year-over-year jump in revenue to $13.6 billion in the second quarter. Demand for the company's cloud computing infrastructure is also rising, as more than 85,000 enterprises are now building applications with cloud-native Gemini models. Google Cloud backlog was $106 billion at the end of the second quarter, indicating strong visibility into future revenue.
Alphabet has been successfully targeting both enterprise and consumer segments with its AI-powered offerings. With capital investment estimated to be $85 billion in 2025 to meet growing demand for servers and data centers, Alphabet has demonstrated a commitment to capturing the growing AI opportunity. All these tailwinds make the company a smart buy in 2025.
Enterprise software giant Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) delivered a stellar financial performance in fiscal 2025 (ending June 30), with revenue rising 15% year over year to $281.7 billion and operating income increasing 17% to $128.5 billion. The company's cloud computing platform, Azure, saw revenue surge 34% to over $75 billion.
Microsoft has built an entire AI ecosystem to support its enterprise clients. The family of Copilot apps (AI-powered virtual assistants integrated in various products and services) had over 100 million monthly active users, both from commercial and consumer segments, at the end of fiscal 2025. Additionally, considering all AI features across its product portfolio, the user base is even larger, at around 800 million active users every month, according to the company.
GitHub Copilot (AI-powered coding assistant) has been gaining rapid traction, with 90% of Fortune 100 companies using it, according to Microsoft. The number of GitHub Copilot enterprise customers also surged 75% quarter over quarter in the fourth quarter. This highlights the company's deep and rapid penetration in the enterprise markets.
Microsoft has also developed extensive infrastructure to support AI workloads. Microsoft Fabric has become the fastest-growing database product in the company's history and it says it is increasingly becoming the preferred data and analytics platform for AI workloads. Azure AI Foundry (a platform-as-a-service offering to handle development, deployment, and management of enterprise AI applications and agents at scale) also handled 500 trillion tokens in fiscal 2025. The company has added over 2 gigawatts of new data center capacity in fiscal 2025, and had over 400 data centers across 70 regions at the end of June.
Microsoft already boasts of $368 billion in committed future revenue and a 98% recurring revenue base.
With businesses accelerating adoption of AI, Microsoft's combination of AI infrastructure, GitHub's developer tools, and enterprise reach makes it an obvious long-term winner.
Digital workflow automation player ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) has positioned itself as a prominent player in the agentic AI landscape. The company delivered exceptional performance in the second quarter of 2025, with subscription revenue growing 21.5% from the year-ago period to $3.1 billion and remaining performance obligation (RPO), a measure of future contracted revenue, rising 25.5% to $23.9 billion. The company reported a robust 98% renewal rate, highlighting the stickiness of its customer base. ServiceNow also closed 89 deals exceeding $1 million in net new annual contract value (ACV), demonstrating strong enterprise demand.
To meet the changing needs of the AI-driven world, ServiceNow offers a complete, integrated, and enterprise-ready AI platform capable of managing, automating, and monitoring AI workflows. The platform includes AI Control Tower (a management solution to enable businesses to oversee, coordinate, and control all AI initiatives from a single hub), AI Agent Fabric (a platform to allow AI agents to work seamlessly with other third-party agents and tools), no-code AI Agent Studio (development tool to build and customize AI agents), and Agentic Workforce Management (enabling employees and AI agents to work collaboratively). By integrating technologies, data sources, and large language models (LLMs) across both on-premise and cloud infrastructure, ServiceNow's platform enables clients to manage cross-functional AI workloads.
ServiceNow's NOW Assist product suite integrates generative AI capabilities with the company's workflow automation platform. Now Assist is also seeing strong demand, as is evident from the rising number of deals and increasing usage of these solutions. The company closed 21 deals involving five or more NOW Assist solutions in the second quarter.
Considering the accelerating demand for its agentic AI offerings, high renewal rates, and growing adoption of NOW Assist, ServiceNow is well-positioned to become a mission-critical platform for businesses in the coming years.
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Manali Pradhan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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