Artificial intelligence adoption is accelerating across industries, with businesses deploying AI to boost productivity, automate operations and enhance customer engagement, according to a recent report from Morgan Stanley.

The brokerage noted that stocks such as Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN ), Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE ) and Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI ) performed well across multiple AI investment screens based on their materiality, pricing power and valuation potential.

The report shows that 60% of CIOs expect to deploy generative AI workloads in production environments by the end of 2025, with top priorities including improving employee productivity, labor cost savings, and customer-facing tools.

Businesses are leveraging AI for capabilities like predictive maintenance, fraud detection, autonomous robots, virtual assistants, and real-time analytics.

Morgan Stanley screens the companies it covers and comes up with five AI-related investment screens.

These screens include: companies where AI is core or a significant component of the investment thesis; companies where AI relevance is increasing; companies with high pricing power; companies that are undervalued in the options market; or companies with high-quality large-cap characteristics.

Among large-cap tech stocks, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA ), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL ), Amazon, Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL ), and Meta (NASDAQ: META ) are listed as drivers and adopters of AI, which is core to their business models and has significant pricing power.

Amazon appears in all three of the screens: high importance and pricing power, increasing importance of AI, and mispriced adoption. Adobe and Johnson Controls also appear in three of the five screens.

In a detailed case study, Amazon was found to have over 1,000 AI applications in use or development and 1 million robots deployed.

AI applications range from retail personalization, logistics (via DeepFleet and drone delivery), Alexa upgrades, and third-party seller support. The company expects AI to reduce traditional labor demand while increasing demand for technology-driven roles.

Microsoft reports that 35% of new codes are now generated by AI, and using Copilot tools across departments, it has achieved a 12% improvement in case resolution speed in customer service and reduced human resources response time by 26%.

Shopify (NASDAQ: SHOP ) is requiring teams to integrate AI and use generative tools for store creation, inventory planning, and personalized shopping experiences.

Walmart (NYSE: WMT ) is applying AI to customer and merchant assistance, logistics, and drone delivery, and plans to launch more personalized tools by the end of the year.

In healthcare, UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH ) has over 1,000 AI use cases, ranging from disease prediction to personalized search and claims processing. IQVIA launched 39 AI tools last year and is developing drug discovery agents with Nvidia.

In financial services, Bank of America’s AI assistant “Erica” has processed nearly 3 billion interactions and handles more than 40% of internal queries.

BlackRock (NYSE: BLK ) uses AI for investment signal analysis, account opening, and customer service through Aladdin Copilot, and is co-leading a $30 billion AI infrastructure fund with Microsoft and MGX.