As the AI industry remains in its early stages, investors have understandably focused on companies in the center of the space: those firms that build the hardware and infrastructure necessary to run AI systems, for example, or those that build and power data centers.
Many large, well-established companies don't need to be part of this foundational aspect of AI in order to reap the benefits, however. Rather, these firms can utilize AI to bring costs down, increase revenue, boost customer retention, and so on. In this landscape, companies outside of the tech space may be positioned as winners from AI even without being directly involved, so long as they have features like valuable proprietary data or large customer bases. Below are some of the invisible AI companies using and benefiting from the tech despite not making or selling it.
