Highest Number of S&P 500 Companies Citing “AI” on Earnings Calls Over Past 10 Years

Artificial intelligence has been a focus topic for the market. Given the heightened interest, have more S&P 500 companies than normal commented on “AI” during their earnings conference calls for the first quarter?

The answer is yes. FactSet Document Search (which allows users to search for key words or phrases across multiple document types) was used to answer this question. Through Document Search, FactSet searched for the term “AI” in the conference call transcripts of all the S&P 500 companies that conducted earnings conference calls from March 15 through May 23.

Of these companies, 199 cited the term “AI” during their earnings call for the first quarter. This number is well above the 5-year average of 80 and the 10-year average of 50.

In fact, this is the highest number of S&P 500 companies citing “AI” on earnings calls going back to at least 2014 (using current index constituents going back in time). The previous record was 182, which occurred in Q2 2023.

For these 199 companies, the average number of times “AI” was mentioned on their earnings calls was 11, while the median number of times “AI” was mentioned on their earnings calls was 5. The term “AI” was mentioned at least 50 times on the earnings calls of 12 S&P 500 companies, led by Meta Platforms (95), NVIDIA (86), and Microsoft (74).

At the sector level, the Information Technology sector has the highest number (50) and percentage (91%) of companies citing “AI” on Q1 earnings calls.

What are these companies saying about artificial intelligence on their earnings calls? Transcript Assistant (FactSet’s interactive generative AI solution that extracts the most salient points from earnings call transcripts with questions from users and pre-populated prompts) can be used to answer this question. 

For example, Transcript Assistant generated the following summary of all the statements about “AI” from the earnings call transcript of Microsoft on April 25:

Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, highlighted the company's record third quarter, driven by the strength of Microsoft Cloud, which surpassed $35 billion in revenue, up 23%. He mentioned that Microsoft's AI offerings, including Microsoft Copilot and Copilot stack, are driving better business outcomes across every role and industry. He also mentioned that Azure continues to gain market share as customers use Microsoft's platforms and tools to build their own AI solutions. Nadella also highlighted the company's strategic partnership with OpenAI, with more than 65% of the Fortune 500 now using Azure OpenAI Service. He also mentioned the company's Models as a Service offering, which makes it easy for developers to use large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) without having to manage any underlying infrastructure. Nadella also mentioned the company's AI-powered features across its low-code/no-code tools, which makes it easier to build an app, automate workflow, or create a Copilot using natural language. He also mentioned the company's AI-powered collaborative articles on LinkedIn, which have reached over 12 million contributions, are helping increase engagement on the platform.*

*Results may vary based on prompts used

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