Evercore singles out 8 AI stocks with resilient business models

Sam Boughedda

Mon, February 23, 2026 at 10:17 PM GMT+9 2 min read

In this article:

•                                       StockStory Top Pick 
  

  EVR

  +0.39%

  MSFT

  -0.31%

 AMZN  

 +2.56%  

 

 

 CHRW  

 +2.63%  

Investing.com – The recent selloff in companies with high exposure to artificial intelligence has been “indiscriminate,” creating openings for investors to identify businesses with durable strategies as AI adoption accelerates, Evercore ISI analysts told investors in a note Monday.

The firm mentioned that the market has exhibited a “sell first, ask questions later” mindset that has pushed down shares regardless of a company’s “business model, strategy, moats or AI earnings potential.”

Julian Emanuel, analyst at Evercore ISI, said AI is reshaping corporate strategy across the economy.

The firm noted that in 2023 it estimated “that every sector and occupation will be leveraged by Generative AI,” and added that adoption is broadening beyond early infrastructure providers as companies rethink workflows and competitive positioning.

The firm also believes companies that adopt early and build protections around “orchestration, secure enterprise guardrails, and agentic execution across siloed data are set to outperform.”

The note said investor pressure on management teams to “act now” is rising as AI enters what Evercore ISI calls a “critical acceleration phase in 2025–2026.”

Against that backdrop, the firm highlighted Microsoft, Snowflake, Palo Alto Networks, Amazon, Booking Holdings, C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Waystar and Apollo Global management as the eight stocks its analysts view as best positioned to benefit from AI adoption.

“EVR ISI’s Kirk Materne expects most investors to take a ‘wait and see’ approach, even amid datapoints suggesting a disconnect between the market’s view of software and fundamentals, as the ‘existential risk’ debate drags on,” wrote Evercore. “‘Scaffolding’ names – including MSFT and SNOW – are preferred over apps against this backdrop”

PANW is seen as “best positioned within cybersecurity to be a primary beneficiary of enterprise AI adoption,” while Amazon is “deploying AI to boost its Cloud business (evidence is AWS Acceleration) as well as its Retail business (Rufus agentic commerce agent, which will help lead to growth acceleration).”

For BKNG, the firm believes that “OTAs can likely be major beneficiaries of AI both in the sense of further diversifying their traffic sources with LLMs and in terms of generating their own agentic offerings and boosting their conversion rates.”

Evercore noted that “CHRW has generated substantial market share gains AND margin expansion during the longest freight market downturn in history by applying Lean AI principles to garner productivity.”

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Meanwhile, “WAY benefits from AI via automation of revenue cycle management, including claim scrubbing, denial prediction, and workflow optimization,” with APO said to be a “relative winner with defensive focus.”

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