AI Will Be One of the Most Important Investment Themes Over the Next Decade: Morgan Stanley

AI and the accompanying technology will be transformational across industries, and will be one of the most important secular investment themes over the next 10 years, Morgan Stanley (MS) said in a research report Monday,

The bank looked into whether recent outperformance in the sector could represent a bubble in the making, and concluded that AI index performance didn’t match the pattern of historical pre-peak bubble returns. A secular investment theme is a long-term trend that isn’t tied to market cycles.

“In the absence of knowing the date of the peak of the current AI bull-run, we assume the generative-AI fuelled market rally to have started with the launch of ChatGPT and so measure the current rally from December,” analysts Edward Stanley and Matias Ovrum wrote.

Typical investment bubbles tend to rally a median of 154% in the three years before peaking, and 217% on average, the note said. While AI winners, such as Nvidia (NVDA), have gained over 200% year-to-date, wider AI indices are up only about 50% and are not yet above prior 2021 highs.

“Stickiness and breadth of diffusion set AI apart from prior hype cycles,” the note added.

Rival Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs (GS) predicts that AI adoption will likely start to have a meaningful impact on the U.S. economy sometime between 2025 and 2030.