Second-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 over the past year. Given the heightened interest, did more S&P 500 companies than normal comment on “AI” during their earnings conference calls for the fourth 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 December 15 through March 14.

Of these companies, 179 cited the term “AI” during their earnings call for the fourth quarter. This number is well above the 5-year average of 73 and the 10-year average of 45.

In fact, this is the second-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 current record is 181, which occurred in Q2 2023.

For these 179 companies, the average number of times “AI” was mentioned on their earnings calls was 13, while the median number of times “AI” was mentioned on their earnings calls was 5. The term “AI” was mentioned more than 50 times on the earnings calls of nine S&P 500 companies, led by NVIDIA at 114. A list of these companies can be found on the next page.

At the sector level, the Information Technology sector had the highest number (52) and percentage (85%) of companies citing “AI” on Q4 earnings calls.

What are these companies saying about artificial intelligence on their earnings calls?

Transcript Assistant can be used to answer this question. Transcript Assistant is FactSet’s first interactive generative AI solution available within the FactSet Workstation. It extracts the most salient points from earnings call transcripts with questions from users and pre-populated prompts.

For example, Transcript Assistant generated the following summary (results may vary based on prompts used) of all the statements about “AI” from NVIDIA’s earnings call transcript on February 21: The document discusses NVIDIA's focus on AI and its impact on various sectors. The company's AI infrastructure is enabling a new computing paradigm, generative AI, which can learn, understand, and generate any information from human language to the structure of biology and the 3D world. NVIDIA AI supercomputers are described as AI generation factories, processing massive raw data to refine it into digital intelligence. The company believes that the shift to AI will drive a doubling of the world's data center infrastructure installed base in the next five years. NVIDIA's full stack computing platform with industry-specific applications frameworks and a huge developer and partner ecosystem is helping companies in every industry become an AI company.

It is interesting to note that the S&P 500 companies that cited “AI” on Q4 earnings calls have seen a better average stock price performance over the past 12 months compared to S&P 500 companies that did not cite “AI” on Q4 earnings calls. For S&P 500 companies that cited “AI” on Q4 earnings calls, the average change in price since March 15 (2023) is 28.6%. For S&P 500 companies that did not cite “AI” on Q4 earnings calls, the average change in price since March 15 (2023) is 16.8%.

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