The Market Isn't Pricing in This AI Megatrend, but These 2 Stocks Could Benefit First

When you think of the companies most benefiting from the early stages of artificial intelligence (AI), most of them are in the chip or cloud computing space. That makes sense, as right now we are in the midst of a huge AI infrastructure capital expenditure (capex) cycle that is trying to keep up with growing demand for AI compute services.

However, there is another potential AI megatrend that is just starting to emerge: AI agents. Let’s look at two stocks that could be the first to benefit.

1. SoundHound AI

SoundHound AI (SOUN 0.91%) is primarily a voice AI company that has developed “speech-to-meaning” and “deep meaning understanding” technology. This allows its solution to interact with people in a more natural way, as it can grasp someone’s intent before they are even finished talking. This technology has helped it gain a strong foothold in both the automotive and restaurant industries, which have looked to improve their voice assistants.

However, it is SoundHound’s move into agentic AI that could be its biggest future driver. The company started its AI agent initiative by acquiring Amelia, which helped fill technology gaps, providing it with conversational intelligence and a knowledge base that included industry-specific jargon in sectors such as financial services and healthcare. Amelia was also a leader in virtual agents, forming the foundation of its AI agent push.

By combining its AI voice technology with Amelia’s virtual AI agents, SoundHound is creating a voice-first AI agent platform. Given the importance of AI agents needing to correctly understand users and their intent, this could be a huge differentiator in this emerging field. SoundHound has already started rolling out its new voice-first AI agent platform, called Amelia 7, to its largest customers. It also recently acquired a company called Interactions to help better orchestrate its AI agents.

If SoundHound can become a leader in AI agents, the stock has huge potential upside that is not priced in.

2. UiPath

With a plethora of companies working to design their own AI agents, UiPath (PATH +2.02%) is positioning itself to be the primary orchestration platform to help customers deal with various AI agents. That’s a huge opportunity, and its background in robotic process automation (RPA), which deploys software bots to automate repetitive business tasks, gives it a nice leg up.

Even in a world of AI agents, software bots still have an important place, since they can complete simple, repetitive tasks at a much cheaper cost than using AI agents. With its Maestro orchestration solution, the company has designed a central control layer that can manage AI agents, bots, and human workers to ensure that the right job is going to the best-equipped and cheapest resource to handle a task. Customers can use UiPath’s solution to create their own AI agents using low-code and no-code tools embedded within the platform, as well as to manage the growing number of third-party AI agents for various companies.

The company has recently partnered with several AI leaders, including Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, and OpenAI to help accelerate AI agent adoption and automation. One of its most intriguing collaborations is with data warehousing giant Snowflake (SNOW +0.41%), which will let its customers use UiPath’s AI orchestration platform to gain instantaneous insights from their data stored with Snowflake. This could help set the company up to be competitive with Palantir Technologies (PLTR 0.01%).

With the onset of AI, UiPath’s growth slowed as companies paused spending to sort out the AI landscape. However, UiPath is showing early signs of a turnaround, and the opportunity in front of it is enormous. While its annual recurring revenue (ARR) rose just 11% last quarter and its revenue by 14%, it may be easy to forget that Palantir grew its revenue by just 13% in Q2 of 2023 before it began to meaningfully accelerate over the preceding two years.

Trading at a price-to-sales (P/S) multiple of just 4.3 times next year’s analyst estimates, the stock has tremendous upside if it can become the leader in AI agent orchestration.