Wedbush thinks adoption of consumer-facing generative AI products is approaching an inflection point this year
Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:
CONSUMER GENAI SURVEY:
As part of the firm’s Q4 Consumer Internet Survey, Wedbush reached over 1,000 U.S. consumers to measure sentiment and adoption of consumer-facing GenAI applications. Feedback from consumers was largely consistent with the firm’s prior survey results and indicates encouraging adoption rates of generative AI tools. Wedbush thinks adoption of consumer-facing generative AI products is approaching an inflection point this year as chatbots transition to full-fledged generative AI agents with a variety of everyday use cases.
The firm anticipates growing consumer adoption of agentic AI features in 2025. Meta (META) is well-positioned to add agentic capabilities to Meta AI, which is approaching 600M monthly active users and is embedded within Meta’s leading social apps, Wedbush notes. Amazon (AMZN) is expected to announce a more advanced Alexa assistant in the coming months, trained on several LLMs, that will be capable of taking more complex actions on a user’s behalf. There are over 500M active Alexa devices and Amazon expects its reimagined Alexa will launch in early 2025.
GEMINI AI:
Google (GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai told employees recently that he believes the company’s Gemini AI technology has surpassed the capabilities of rivals and he wants the chatbot built on it to be used by 500 million people by the end of 2025, The Wall Street Journal’s Miles Kruppa reports, citing people familiar with the matter. It is unclear how many people use Gemini currently, though ChatGPT has about 300 million weekly users; the Gemini app was the 54th most downloaded free app on iPhones Wednesday, while ChatGPT was No. 4, Kruppa writes.
GENAI A BOOST FOR ARISTA:
BofA raised the firm’s price target on Arista Networks (ANET) to $130 from $114 and kept a Buy rating on the shares as the firm believes the company could be a significant beneficiary from the networking infrastructure cycle that is being driven by Generative AI. The expansive computational demands of GenAI models are driving up demand for switches, routers, optical and storage, adds the firm, which also expects Cisco (CSCO) and Ciena (CIEN) to be key beneficiaries.
AI-DRIVEN AUTOMATION:
Oppenheimer initiated coverage of Symbotic (SYM) with an Outperform rating and $35 price target. The firm sees the company “disrupting” the warehouse and distribution center market with artificial intelligence-driven automation that has the potential to reshape the fulfillment supply chain. Symbotic is a leading automated warehouse system that leverages vertical integration into a large opportunity, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Opco says that while Symbotic’s backlog supports growth through fiscal 2028, customer concentration is at risk.
COLLABORATION:
IBM (IBM) and L’Oreal (LRLCY) announced a collaboration to leverage IBM’s generative artificial intelligence technology and expertise to uncover new insights into cosmetic formulation data, facilitating L’Oreal’s use of sustainable raw materials, for energy and material waste reductions. This effort will develop a custom AI foundation model engineered to significantly increase the ability of L’Oreal Research & Innovation teams to reach extra performance and consumer satisfaction in every cosmetic category and every region of the world.
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Originally Posted January 16, 2025 – AI Daily: Google wants 500M Gemini AI users by year-end
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If you are able to monetize AI today, great. Let’s see how/if they can spin the next earnings cycle after so many millions spent. Does expectation of future bottom line revenue float in the next few weeks? Otherwise it will need to be a loss leader, just like “AI Overview” in Google Search. Think DOGE => government employee review time => “if you want me to perform that well, then you have to give me the tools so that I can!”… That could work.