Hello Investors from the French Riviera.
You and Brad Smith will be performing live from the advertising industry’s de facto Super Bowl at Yahoo Finance Live at Cannes Lions, the de facto Super Bowl of the advertising industry, throughout the week. Attendees included Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino (and reportedly her new billionaire boss Elon Musk), Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and Spotify founder Daniel Ek. Everyone is present, including Mr. And, of course, Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone is working on this issue internally.
We have a couple of potentially stock-moving interviews kicking off this morning that we encourage you to watch and follow. Yahoo Finance Twitter feed.
That hype aside, what I’m trying to say here is that after spending 48 hours on the ground on a continent, I can safely say that the AI hype bubble has crossed the pond.
One of my main thoughts so far has been, “Shouldn’t this be an advertising industry event, not Techcrunch Disrupt 2023?”
Sparkly people, presumably at the conference in some way, keep running along the picturesque beach with AI references on their t-shirts.
Snapchat has acquired an entire beachfront building to hype its various AI and VR efforts (which is exactly what social media platforms are struggling to do with their cost structure).
Meta had the biggest presence at the event, as far as I know (again, rivaling Zuck’s Year of Efficiency), with Amazon probably the biggest. And it continues to promote WhatsApp’s new features and AI efforts.
Pinterest will no doubt be discussing its AI efforts at the company’s beach house, just a few blocks away from Yahoo and Google’s YouTube. More on that here from a recent chat with Bill Ready).
AI is a hot topic in most panel discussions, with a strong focus on how technology will shape the advertising industry.
This year is also an event for AI enthusiasts for me. It doesn’t get much better than this.
And you, the investor, can’t beat that either.
Stocks, and even the S&P 500 index as a whole, continue to be supported simply by mentioning new AI tools from various tech companies. Food companies are highlighting the potential of AI in their earnings announcements. Food company!
Companies are going to great lengths to enable their marketing and investor relations departments to leverage AI in external forums.
This is all getting crazy.
I’m not saying generative AI is like an internet bubble. Generative AI has the potential to be truly transformative for businesses, and for their bottom line. But AI being talked about so freely is becoming a red flag for me from an investment perspective. If anyone is doing something with their investments, it is often wise to question it and consider the opposite.
My advice would be to check the reputation of companies discussing AI, see if they are profitable and generating cash, and ask if what they are doing is really new when it comes to AI. .
In my opinion, two great examples of new AI projects outside of Microsoft and Google are AMD and Salesforce.
For me, it’s back to the French Riviera…and back to the AI hype bubble.
Brian Sotzi Executive editor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sotzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and further LinkedIn.
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