By Adam Clark

Monday.com is having a good Monday. Its earnings were ahead of expectations and its artificial-intelligence initiatives underlines the shift of hopes regarding AI toward software from hardware stocks.

The work-management software company reported a profit of $1.08 a share on an adjusted basis, up 66% from a year earlier. Analysts had predicted adjusted profit of 79 cents.

Monday.com reported fourth-quarter revenue of $268 million, a 32% increase from a year earlier. This was ahead of the $261.4 million average from analysts polled by FactSet. For 2025, it predicted revenue of $1.21 billion to $1.22 billion, compared with the consensus expectation for $1.208 billion.

Shares were rising 25% to $321.59 in premarket trading. That put the stock on course to reach its highest level since 2021.

"There was much investor debate going into this print, and we believe the results put a lot of investor fears to bed...We continue to like Monday long term and view it as one of the true emerging platform stories in software," wrote William Blair analyst Arjun Bhatia.

Bhatia has an Outperform rating on the stock with no price target.

On top of the good results, Monday.com said its AI enterprise-service management product is now out of beta testing and available to all customers. The company said it would allow customers to use AI agents -- artificial intelligence that can act autonomously -- for so-called incident resolution. Its first agent will be launched in March.

As Barron's has written, the availability of low-cost AI, as demonstrated by China's DeepSeek, could redirect investment dollars from hardware such as servers and semiconductors to software. Other software companies offering AI agents include Salesforce and ServiceNow.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

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February 10, 2025 09:17 ET (14:17 GMT)

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