Sean D. Emory
Founding Partner & CIO of Avory & Co., Avory Foundational ETF (AVRY)
Companies without true innovators at the top will be crushed in the AI era, which favors innovator-led companies like Block, Zoom, Zillow, Airbnb, Clear Secure and Okta. @nachunja notes Jack Dorsey pushed Block toward open-source models in 2023, having lived through Square's early dependence on Visa, so Block won't casually accept concentrated token-supplier risk from Anthropic or OpenAI. x.comÂ
Cybersecurity looks like AI's next major use case, making CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and Okta stocks to own now. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said cybersecurity will be a major use case for AI, and that signal from Huang, more than any personal call, is the reason to pay attention to the group. x.com x.com x.comÂ
AI agents' value may accrue to whoever owns the orchestration, identity and wallet layer, as in cloud, where less pure platforms that owned the environment captured most value. Responding to @hiddensmallcaps' AI-agent basket, Circle and Coinbase are the real picks for agent payments via USDC and payment rails, while hosting, edge and API names are AI traffic beta. The control layer adds Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Zoom and Palantir, though they are less pure plays. x.com x.comÂ
Block may be hurt rather than helped if small businesses get Muse-like AI agents, because such agents could destroy its software margins and value proposition, which sit on top of commodity hardware and payments. x.comÂ
Cybersecurity stocks have a powerful long-term tailwind because more AI means more complexity, more attack surface and more need for security. CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Fortinet, Okta and Rubrik moved up strongly premarket after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay arguing the AI industry should slow down, with Anthropic committing to give third-party evaluators permanent access to verify its safety measures. The market may be connecting those dots. x.comÂ
Zoom, Salesforce and SK Telecom offer double upside as proxies for Anthropic, which has filed an S-1 for a $1T+ IPO. Each holds billions of dollars of Anthropic exposure, plus vendor status and unique collaborations beyond a simple equity stake, yet the market prices none of them as AI beneficiaries. They are contrarian bets: Zoom's product has been relegated to a feature, Salesforce is the SaaSpocalypse poster boy, and SK Telecom is a telco just hit by a damning cyber attack. x.com x.comÂ
Airbnb is off-limits because AI agents could disrupt bookings. That view could change if the company adapts, pivots and proves it wrong. x.comÂ
Software and consumer discretionary stocks such as Booking, Shopify, Zoom and Amazon are where the AI payoff could show up strongest first. AI chip stocks are just the pickaxes, and their demand exists only because companies expect massive efficiency gains, margin expansion and revenue growth from that compute, gains that have yet to show up in the stocks using it. x.com x.com x.comÂ
Security, identity, observability and data governance are the less crowded side of the enterprise AI stack and should benefit as open models make AI cheaper. In multi-model setups, switching models gets easier, but rebuilding years of access controls, audit logs, proprietary data pipelines and internal workflows does not. Hardware remains scarce and critical, but names such as Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, Okta, Datadog, NetApp and Snowflake sit around the model. x.comÂ
Long Microsoft and short Zoom is the most straightforward alpha trade around. The long leg gives exposure to Microsoft and OpenAI, called good companies, while the short leg is Zoom and Anthropic, dismissed as bad ones. x.comÂ
Internet stocks merit tactically higher gross exposure again because, even outside the hyperscalers, there are enough idiosyncratic momentum stories such as DoorDash, Airbnb and Shopify. They are not tied directly to AI capex or to the daily debate over whether AI labs will steamroll them. x.comÂ
