The UK stocks using AI to gain an edge
Former City analyst Robin Hardy takes a look at how companies are benefiting from the new technology
Published on July 24, 2026 by Robin Hardy
AI is an investor obsession. But what is it actually good for?
After the trillions of dollars sunk into it, we must hope it eventually amounts to much more than the poor-quality chatbots or ‘AI slop’ images and videos that are now everywhere online. Without strong and rising evidence of the positive and material returns on those vast investment sums, markets could all too easily conclude that AI is, after all, a bubble.
Commercially, machine learning is by far the most important aspect of AI as this is what automates operations, unlocks data insights, spots trends, and allows commercial and industrial IT systems to make business decisions without explicit programming. Those last three words are key because it is this that gives AI the appearance of intelligence. In practice, it is just very clever general-purpose frameworks that allow decision-making algorithms to be generated as and when required.
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