On December 6, the Star Daily reported that two years ago, OpenAI's ChatGPT showcased the enormous potential of AIGC to the world. Today, two years later, AIGC has quickly penetrated various fields, from digital advertising and online search to improving translation efficiency and automating cumbersome processes; this AI revolution is spreading at an accelerating pace.

In the secondary market, chips are no longer the most favored direction for AI investments; instead, AI applications have taken the lead—more and more strong stocks are emerging in the USA stock market, with "AI+voice" concept stocks rising nearly 530% this year and "AI+defense" concept stocks increasing over 318%...

OpenAI will hold 12 conferences in 12 days, which may further open up greater imaginative possibilities for AI applications.

On December 5 local time, several AI application concept stocks in the USA stock market either reached new highs or surged significantly after hours.

▌AI+Defense: Palantir

Recently, a cooperation agreement between OpenAI and defense technology startup Anduril Industries has drawn attention back to "AI+defense." In fact, prior to this, a strong stock had already emerged in this niche AI application field—Palantir.

"At the beginning of the AI boom, Palantir had already emerged, and its stock price has continually set historical highs, increasing over 318% this year. It has even been dubbed the "Messi of the AI field" by analysts. In September of this year, the company was just added to the S&P 500 index and has become the best-performing component stock in this index this year, even surpassing nvidia.

As a leader in big data analysis, palantir can be considered a significant representative of AI to B/G applications, especially "AI + defense" applications. The company mainly serves governments and financial institutions, with its products particularly prominent in defense and security applications. There are reports that palantir helped the usa's CIA kill osama bin laden.

In April 2023, the company officially launched AIP (AI Platform), empowering customers to effectively control the scope of large model learning and running data, meeting the military, government, and commercial customers' demands for data privacy. In military applications, the AIP platform can provide commanders with detailed battlefield information, various types of intelligence data during operations, and offer actionable options to optimize the decision-making process and shorten decision time. After the commander makes a decision, AIP can issue commands and monitor the entire operational process.

Since the beginning of this year, palantir has delivered performance results that have generally exceeded external expectations. In the third quarter, the number of its usa commercial clients increased by 77% year-on-year to 321. The company clearly stated in the earnings conference that it has seen a significant demand from downstream commercial clients.

▌AI + Voice: SoundHound AI

The AI smart voice company SoundHound AI surged over 30% on December 5 local time, reaching its highest stock price in nearly two years, and continued to rise in post-market trading. This year, it has increased by nearly 530%.

SoundHound started with AI voice assistants. Unlike traditional AI voice understanding (which translates speech into text before understanding), SoundHound's AI can directly understand the meaning of speech, helping to improve speed and accuracy. The company has always been looking for stronger revenue-generating application areas for its products, with one key focus being dining. Previously, SoundHound had already signed agreements with several companies in the dining sector, including Chipotle, Jersey Mike's, White Castle, Panda Express, and Church's Texas Chicken.

The latest reason for this surge is that SoundHound announced that its AI smart ordering service has been launched in all 130 chain restaurants of the burrito chain Torchy’s Tacos. Customers at the restaurant can use AI voice to place orders over the phone, inquire about menu items, business hours, and other related information. The AI can also handle multiple calls simultaneously, improving order processing efficiency.

▌AI applications have entered the stage of incremental performance realization.

If the applications of AI in defense, voice, marketing, e-commerce, gaming, pharmaceuticals and other areas have already taken root in people's minds, now the understanding of AI applications from the outside is becoming increasingly refined and diversified, and there are also more AI application concept stocks that have proven the ways of monetizing AI with financial report performances.

On December 5 local time, Docusign, Asana, and Rubrik saw a collective surge in post-market trading, with increases generally around 20%. The surge was entirely driven by better-than-expected financial report data.

Docusign is the global leader in digital signature platforms, allowing users to create and manage agreements on its platform, and utilize AI to assist in contract reviews, predictive input, and checking contract status.

The latest announced financial report shows that for the fiscal quarter ending October 31, the company's total revenue was 0.755 billion USD, an 8% year-on-year increase, exceeding analyst expectations for four consecutive quarters; subscription revenue was 0.735 billion USD, also an 8% year-on-year increase. The company's CEO Allan Thygesen stated that the early momentum of Docusign's Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) platform in the third fiscal quarter exceeded expectations.

Asana is a work management platform for enterprises, with clients covering over 0.15 million companies globally. According to the latest third-quarter report for fiscal year 2025, the company's revenue was 0.184 billion USD, a 10% year-on-year increase; loss per share was 0.02 USD, both better than market expectations. The number of core customers (spending 5000 USD or more annually) increased by 11%, and the number of customers spending over 0.1 million USD increased by 18%.

At the same time, Asana raised its revenue forecast for the full fiscal year 2025, lowered its full-year loss scale forecast, and announced the launch of AI Studio, marking its transition to a multi-product company.

Rubrik is a data security software provider. A few days ago, Rubrik launched a new API service called Annapurna, aimed at helping organizations build secure generative AI applications on Amazon Bedrock.

The company's latest announced financial report shows that for the third fiscal quarter ending October 31, Rubrik's revenue was 0.236 billion USD, a 43% year-on-year increase, exceeding analyst expectations; adjusted loss per share was 0.21 USD, better than analyst expectations; and the performance outlook provided for the fourth fiscal quarter and the full year was also better than analyst expectations. The strong performance was due to the increase in subscriptions, with Rubrik's subscriptions increasing by 38% year-on-year during the reporting period, reaching 0.2215 billion USD; the number of customers with annual recurring subscription revenue above 0.1 million USD was 2085, a 32% year-on-year increase.

It is worth mentioning that recently, salesforce, elastic, and snowflake also released extremely impressive earnings. Brokerages pointed out that the performance of software stocks this quarter may indicate that companies in the ai application sector will gradually enter the stage of realizing incremental performance brought by ai, and it is recommended to continue to pay attention to the commercialization process of ai in the future.

▌"The era of ai software has already arrived."

Hedge fund ARK Invest's CEO Cathie Wood has stated that software stocks will be the next major opportunity for ai, as these companies can generate 8 dollars in return for every 1 dollar spent on chips from suppliers like nvidia.

Not long ago, well-known analyst Daniel Ives from Wedbush also expressed a similar viewpoint—ai is becoming a key driving force in the software sector. Now, the entire software industry is fully embracing the ai wave. With the rapid increase in usage scenarios, it is expected that enterprises will begin to enter the large-scale application stage of ai in 2025. The widespread deployment of large models and the popularization of AIGC will both become important catalysts for the development of the software industry.

"It can be said that the era of ai software has already arrived."