Buy 3 AI Laggards of 2025 With Solid Short-Term Price Upside Potential

The artificial intelligence (AI)-driven, astonishing bull run of 2023 and 2024 has suffered major hurdles in 2025. The Fed’s ambiguity over further rate cuts in 2025, fears of a near-term recession and the availability of a low-cost Chinese AI platform have unnerved investors.

Moreover, severe concerns related to the Trump administration’s tariff and trade policies significantly dented market participants’ confidence in risky assets like equities. The technology sector has suffered the most since these stocks, especially the AI-focused ones, have skyrocketed in the last two years.

Here, we have identified three AI stocks with a favorable Zacks Rank that have significantly lagged in 2025. However, these stocks have room to grow in the short term. These stocks are: Arista Networks Inc. ANET, Five9 Inc. FIVN and HubSpot Inc. HUBS. Each of our picks carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

The chart below shows the price performance of our three picks year to date.

Arista Networks Inc.

Arista Networks is well-positioned with the right network architecture for client-to-campus data center cloud and AI networking backed by three guiding principles. These include the best-in-class, highly proactive products with resilience, zero-touch automation and telemetry with predictive client-to-cloud one-click operations with granular visibility and prescriptive insights for deeper AI algorithms.

ANET’s EOS Smart AI Suite and Arista AVA (Autonomous Virtual Assist) enhance AI job monitoring, deep-dive analytics, and proactive performance issue resolution. Its AI suite also focuses on network security and optimization.

ANET’s AI-powered cloud networking solutions provide predictable performance and programmability, enabling seamless integration with third-party applications for network management, automation and orchestration. 

Arista AVA offers augmentation of pervasive visibility, continuous threat detection, and enforcement. The growing demand for 200- and 400-gig high-performance switching products augurs well for ANET’s long-term growth. 

Impressive Short-Term Price Upside for ANET Stock

Arista Networks has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 18.7% and 12.8%, respectively, for the current year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for current-year earnings has improved 4% in the last 30 days. 

The short-term average price target of brokerage firms for the stock represents an increase of 19.3% from the last closing price of $92.79. The brokerage target price is currently in the range of $87-$130. This indicates a maximum upside of 40.1% and a downside of 6.2%.

Five9 Inc.

Five9 provides intelligent cloud software for contact centers in the United States, India, and internationally. FIVN offers a virtual contact center cloud platform that delivers a suite of applications, enabling a broad range of contact center-related customer service, sales, and marketing functions. 

FIVN’s platform comprises interactive virtual agents, agent assistance, workflow automation, workforce engagement management, AI insights, and AI summaries. It allows management and optimization of customer interactions across voice, chat, email, web, social media, and mobile channels directly or through its application programming interfaces.

FIVN has been benefiting from the growing adoption of AI tools in its call center services, with personalized AI agents emerging as a major growth driver. On Feb. 19, Five9 introduced its Intelligent CX Platform powered by Five9 Genius AI on the Google Cloud space. FIVN also released new Five9 AI agents tailor-made for Google Cloud.  

Lucrative Short-Term Price Upside for FIVN Shares

Five9 has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 9.6% and 11.7%, respectively, for the current year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for current-year earnings has improved 6.6% over the last 30 days.

The short-term average price target of brokerage firms for the stock represents an increase of 35% from the last closing price of $27.11. The brokerage target price is currently in the range of $23-$65. This indicates a maximum upside of 139.8% and a downside of 15.2%.

HubSpot Inc.

HubSpot provides a cloud-based customer relationship management platform for businesses in the Americas, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. HUBS is witnessing steady multi-hub adoption from enterprise customers in the premium market. Pricing optimization in HUBS’ starter edition is leading to solid client additions in the lower end of the market. 

The integration of HubSpot AI, which includes state-of-the-art features, such as AI assistance, AI agents, AI insights and ChatSpot, is driving more value to customers. HUBS’ seat pricing model lowers the barrier for customers to get started with its business and mitigates pricing friction for upgrades. The growing adoption of inbound applications is a tailwind.

Attractive Short-Term Price Upside for HUBS Shares

HubSpot has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 15.4% and 14.9%, respectively, for the current year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for current-year earnings has improved 2.1% in the last 30 days.

The short-term average price target of brokerage firms for the stock represents an increase of 23.9% from the last closing price of $616.92. The brokerage target price is currently in the range of $645-$930. This indicates a maximum upside of 50.7% and no downside.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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