We recently published a list of 10 Best Mid Cap AI Stocks to Buy Now. In this article, we are going to take a look at where C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE:AI) stands against other best mid cap AI stocks to buy now.

In 2025, the technology companies continue to focus on developing AI platforms that meet their enterprise customers’ needs for optimized performance, profitability and security, says Morgan Stanley. In doing so, they have been partnering throughout the AI ecosystem of chips companies, hyperscalers, large language models, and data and software companies while grappling with the US trade policy unknowns and resource constraints. The firm believes that the top trends in new AI frontiers and the emphasis on enterprises consist of AI reasoning, cloud migrations, custom silicon, systems to measure AI efficacy, and developing an agentic AI future.

Key Themes Likely to Shape the Industry

Morgan Stanley, while quoting executives from companies designing and making chips, stated that AI reasoning happens to be one of the biggest drivers of higher compute demand, and thus, semiconductors. Notably, AI reasoning goes over and above the basic understanding and into advanced learning and decision-making, which needs additional compute for pre-training, post-training, and inference. As per Marco Lagos Morales (Head of U.S. Semiconductor Investment Banking at Morgan Stanley), for chip companies, customer demand remains in the breadth of AI workloads for programmable infrastructure.

The next theme revolves around LLMs seeing potential in AI reasoning for enterprises. Morgan Stanley highlighted that companies that have developed the world’s biggest LLMs focus on using the most effective chips and building the best software to provide AI services that become critical for companies and consumers. As per LLM executives, while the early use cases for LLMs revolved around content generation, summarization, and classification, the biggest untapped potential is in AI reasoning for the enterprise data.

READ ALSO: 7 Best Stocks to Buy For Long-Term and 8 Cheap Jim Cramer Stocks to Invest In.

Software Companies Focusing on Agentic AI, Says Morgan Stanley

The software executives mentioned regarding their current use of AI for the purposes of productivity gains in marketing and engineering and their longer-term prospects in a bid to gain market share in an agentic computing future. Morgan Stanley further highlighted that such companies continue to aim to create large systems deploying AI agents to make decisions, take autonomous actions, and adapt to dynamic environments for real-world applications throughout various industries. According to Brittany Skoda, Global Head of Software Banking, software companies continue to compete to create larger operating systems that harness machine learning, natural language processing, LLMs, GenAI, and decision-making algorithms to move towards an agentic future.

Our Methodology

To list the 10 Best Mid Cap AI Stocks to Buy Now, we used a screener and sifted through several media reports to shortlist the mid-cap companies catering to the AI industry. Next, we selected the stocks that are the most popular among hedge funds. We have mentioned the hedge fund sentiment around each stock, as of Q4 2024.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).

A doctor in a laboratory, overseeing the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE:AI) 

Market Cap as of March 27: $3 billion

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 25

C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE:AI) operates as an enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) software company. It has announced an expanded strategic partnership with Microsoft, which can significantly accelerate the former’s growth trajectory. The integration of C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE:AI)’s Enterprise AI application software on the Microsoft Commercial Cloud Portal is expected to open up a vast new distribution channel for the company’s products. Apart from providing C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE:AI) with enhanced visibility, it also lends credibility related to Microsoft’s brand, potentially making it easier to get large enterprise contracts.

Also, C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE:AI)’s comprehensive platform for building and deploying AI applications throughout numerous industries provides a competitive edge in the rapidly expanding sector. The enhanced focus on AI adoption throughout industries, mainly in federal, defense, and government sectors, remains in line with the company’s strengths. With enterprises recognizing the value of AI in optimizing operations and fueling innovation, C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE:AI)’s domain-specific AI capabilities and strategic partnerships place it well to capture an enhanced share of the growing market.

Overall, AI ranks 9th on our list of best mid cap AI stocks to buy now. While we acknowledge the potential of AI as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some deeply undervalued AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for a deeply undervalued AI stock that is more promising than AI but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.