Rule Breakers Analysts Hunt AI’s Invisible Winners

At FoolFest 2026, The Motley Fool's annual gathering for members, co-founder David Gardner was asked what has attracted his curiosity right now that most investors might be missing. His answer began with AI.

"Well, I think we're all paying attention to artificial intelligence for very obvious reasons. It is a general technology."

Later in the same answer, he added, "So I don't feel any stress or anxiety that I don't have enough AI in my portfolio."

That kind of calm takes imagination, perhaps the most underrated skill in investing. The AI winners David has in mind aren't household names yet, and some probably don't exist.

His reasoning starts about a century ago, with an idea he credits to Vasant Dhar, an NYU professor and author of Thinking With Machines. Dhar traces AI's lineage back through the internet and the computer to electricity.

Before there were electric saws, there were saws, and you had a saw, but all of a sudden somebody else showed up with, 'Well, we can actually electrify this, and we can electrify all of our society, and electricity will become general and also very cheap.'

The Second Wave

Most of today's attention goes to the builders of AI, such as Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)(NASDAQ:GOOG). David calls them "amazing stocks," and Nvidia has been one of the defining picks of his career. He thinks the overlooked opportunity lies a layer farther out.

I really think where we're not looking enough maybe, because we can't yet, is the companies that will be using AI in an almost invisible way. They'll just be offering new innovative services and products that could not have existed without artificial intelligence.

The internet followed the same sequence. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) was in investors' sights early. "But then along came Uber, and then along came Airbnb. Ten years later, things that used the internet and enabled us to do things that didn't exist before."

Uber (NYSE:UBER) and Airbnb (NASDAQ:ABNB) were founded more than a decade after Amazon went public. Nobody booking a ride or a spare room thinks about the networks underneath.

David is looking for that kind of company, one whose customers may never notice the AI at all. The wait could be shorter this time. As Chapter 7 of Rule Breaker Investing notes, AI is catching on even faster than the internet did, so more Rule Breakers are likely headed our way than ever.

Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR) shows what an early start can look like. David, a shareholder, credits it with deploying AI at scale "way earlier than a lot of other companies." In 2025, The Economist asked whether Palantir might be the most overvalued firm of all time. David's response: "There you go. What a Rule Breaker."

Playing the Long Game

Two things have to go right. AI has to keep spreading the way electricity did, getting cheaper and more general. And the companies that use it most creatively have to come public while they still have room to run. If either one falls short, the builders could prove the best AI investments after all.

David, for his part, is sticking with the innovators.

As a Rule Breaker, I'll be focused on what are the companies that are using AI in a way that I may not even notice as a customer and doing special things. And always to the innovators. In every industry, it's always about who's truly innovating, 'cause that's the hardest thing to do in business.

The Chief Rule Breaker no longer picks stocks for members himself, but the analysts on Team Rule Breakers who do carry the same outlook. We're optimists by nature, and we invest for a future we expect to be bigger than today. We welcome a compelling story, and then we test it against the numbers. Like venture capitalists, we invest with a long horizon and accept that some picks will miss, because that's the trade-off of Rule Breaking. A single great winner can more than make up for those misses, and we're always looking for the next one.

David Gardner has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has positions in Airbnb, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.