Why you should buy these 3 AI stocks right now
Why you should buy these 3 AI stocks right now
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Retirement worries grow as seniors face Trump tariffs, stock selloff
Retired educator and part-time yoga instructor Vicki Knight says she feels stretched thin. "I'm semi-retired." The Marietta, Georgia, resident says her Social Security income is not enough to live on and that a recent stock market selloff fueled by tariff uncertainty has complicated her plans.
The U.S. equity market has experienced high volatility so far in 2025, driven by aggressive tariff policies, ongoing trade wars, rising interest rates, and shifting investor behaviors. Yet, this period has also presented opportunities to acquire reasonably priced, high-quality stocks.
You do not need substantial funds to take advantage of the current environment. Just $200 – not kept aside for bills or emergency savings – can be invested in any of these artificial intelligence (AI)-powered stocks for at least the next five years.
Palantir
Palantir Technologies' (NASDAQ: PLTR) data mining and analytics platform helps unify, organize, and manage vast amounts of organizational data across various sources and formats to generate actionable insights. The company's earnings performance highlights the strong demand for its offerings.
Palantir's first-quarter results were impressive, with revenue rising 39% year over year to $884 million. The company's U.S. revenue grew even faster, at 55% year over year, and now accounts for almost 71% of the total business. Notably, the U.S. commercial business has also crossed the $1 billion annual revenue run rate in the first quarter.
Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) has positioned the company as providing a major ontology (a digital framework that links an organization's digital and real-world assets) and AI-powered operating system for commercial enterprises and government agencies.
Unlike other AI players that focus on developing advanced foundational models, Palantir primarily concentrates on AI implementations, translating the capabilities of large language models into business outcomes. AIP enables enterprise autonomy, helping clients build autonomous AI agents for various tasks.
Customer adoption of the company's offerings has been strong. Walgreens Boots Alliance has automated nearly 384 billion daily decisions across 4,000 stores in eight months, while American International Group expects its five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to double after adopting Palantir's technology.
Hence, despite trading at a very rich valuation of 208 times forward earnings, Palantir's implementation-focused AI strategy and strong customer demand present an exceptional long-term opportunity for retail investors.
SoundHound AI
SoundHound AI's (NASDAQ: SOUN) recent earnings performance has also been stellar. With revenue surging 151% year over year to $29.1 million, and none of its customers accounting for more than 10% of the total revenue, the company has built a high-growth and well-diversified business.
SoundHound has created a sustainable competitive moat with its proprietary multimodal and multilingual Polaris foundation model, which supports 30 languages and delivers 4 times better latency, twice the sentence accuracy in noisy environments, and 35% better word error rates. Consequently, the company is well-positioned to capture share in the global voice and speech recognition market, estimated to grow from $19.1 billion in 2025 to $81.6 billion by 2030.
Furthermore, SoundHound's strategic acquisitions of SYNQ3, Allset, and Amelia have expanded the company's reach to nearly 13,000 restaurants, while also opening new cross-selling opportunities across several verticals. The company has recently introduced a voice commerce ecosystem that integrates conversational AI capabilities in vehicles, enabling hands-free ordering from restaurants while driving. This feature has generated significant interest from automakers and could become a substantial revenue stream in the years to come.
SoundHound's stock is down nearly 60% from its all-time high in December 2024. Coupled with multiple tailwinds, this discounted price appears to be the right time to buy this stock now.
UiPath
Shares of robotic process automation (RPA) player UiPath (NYSE: PATH) are currently down nearly 86% from their all-time high in May 2021. The company has suffered in the current uncertain macroeconomic environment, despite its strong fundamentals.
In its recent earnings results (the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025, ended Jan. 31), UiPath's revenue was slightly below analyst estimates, primarily due to the timing of deal closures in the government business.
However, UiPath's strategic pivot toward agentic AI can prove to be a significant catalyst in the long run. Several of its agentic AI products, including Agent Builder, Agentic Orchestration, and Agentic Testing, are already seeing strong adoption trends. With Agent Builder, nearly 3,000 agents have been added to workflows to create mission-critical processes.
Agentic Orchestration is helping orchestrate specialized agents, robots, and people to execute goal-based tasks. Agentic Testing is also helping software testers improve productivity with agents. This approach to combining AI agents with traditional RPA has been a key differentiator for the company.
UiPath also boasts robust customer metrics, with a dollar-based gross retention rate of 98% and a dollar-based net retention rate of 110% in the fourth quarter. Additionally, while the total customer count remained flat year over year, high-value customers spending over $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased by 10% year over year, and those spending $5 million or more increased by 30% in the fourth quarter.
Finally, UiPath also has a robust balance sheet with $1.7 billion in cash and zero debt.
Despite the many advantages, UiPath trades at only 4.6 times sales, significantly lower than its three-year average of 6.9 times. Hence, considering the multiple tailwinds and low valuation, the stock is a worthwhile investment, even though the company has experienced a slowdown in its growth trajectory over the past few quarters.
Manali Pradhan has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Palantir Technologies and UiPath. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The Motley Fool is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news, analysis and commentary designed to help people take control of their financial lives. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
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