AI Is the Hot Topic in Tech Earnings and a Blind Spot Everywhere Else

While discussion of AI dominates tech earnings calls, analysts are showing little interest in how — or whether — the rest of the economy is keeping up.

By Carolyn SilvermanJo ConstantzJennah Haque Illustration by Simon Bailly December 19, 2025

Wall Street is asking technology companies a lot of questions about how artificial intelligence is being developed and financed. It’s showing less curiosity about how other companies are using it, even as business customers in the US alone spent $86 billion this year on AI systems.

Fewer than half the companies in the S&P 500 Index received questions from analysts about generative AI on earnings calls in 2025, according to an analysis of call transcripts by Bloomberg News. In the most recent quarter, when more than 80% of tech companies in the index were asked about AI, the topic was put to just under a third of S&P 500 companies overall.

The scant questions about AI may come as a surprise three years into a $30 trillion bull run for the S&P 500, the start of which coincided with the debut of ChatGPT. The release of the OpenAI chatbot invited stark predictions that AI would revolutionize office work, customer service and other business operations.

“I’m shocked anybody can host an earnings call and not talk about it right now or not be asked about it by an investor,” said Heath Terry, global head of technology and communications research at Citigroup Inc. “To me it’s one of — if not the most important question — that you should be asking a company because if they don’t have a strategy for this, they’re probably going to get left behind.”

Bloomberg’s review of more than 7,000 earnings call transcripts, performed with the help of a large-language model, tallied questions about AI meant to mimic or augment human abilities to think, reason, solve problems, make decisions or complete complex tasks. The analysis excluded questions about factory automation, self-driving vehicles, and leases or funding for data centers.

Energy and utility providers — along with select industrials, materials companies and real estate firms — are getting questions about how they’ll profit from the massive infrastructure investments required to power and house new AI capacity. But these companies are rarely pressed by analysts on how they’re using AI themselves.

Management teams in sectors including finance and real estate are starting to get more questions about their AI strategies. But that line of inquiry remains rare.

Typically on earnings calls, analysts prioritize what they consider to be the biggest or most immediate concerns for the companies they follow.

Outside of tech, AI “doesn’t really matter that much, it’s not big enough to move the needle,” said Ohsung Kwon, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo & Co.

That may change, though.

In a recent Bloomberg Intelligence survey of more than 600 senior executives from large companies across nine sectors, predictions for a high degree of disruption from AI came from every industry represented in the poll. And respondents from five sectors — financial services, media and cable, hospitals, pharmaceuticals and telecoms — said the impact of AI would include a “high” or “very high” near-term rise in operating costs.

Excluding firms that are building the AI industry, US companies spent an estimated $86 billion on the technology in 2025, according to Rick Villars, vice president at market research firm IDC. Next year, that sum is expected to surge to $131 billion.

Analysts are asking the architects of the AI industry, who are spending many times that amount to build the technology, to demonstrate a path to financial returns on their investment. On calls with companies in other sectors, however, they often seem to be searching for use cases.

Most AI discussion, when it comes up during the question-and-answer portion of earnings calls for non-tech companies, relates to adoption and development. Some analysts are asking about expected returns and spending plans tied to AI. Management, meanwhile, is more likely to bring up productivity gains associated with the technology.

Wall Street could be missing opportunities to gauge executive sentiment toward AI, and with it potential signals about corporate demand for the technology. As veterans of the dot-com bust remember, information from users can help investors judge the correct pace and scale for the expansion of a new technology.

Read more: Why Fears of a Trillion-Dollar AI Bubble Are Growing

“The internet ultimately was game changing, but what caused the bubble to grow and then burst was there was too much investment too fast. People weren’t adopting the tech quickly enough,” said Bloomberg Intelligence equity strategist Gillian Wolff.

The same danger exists with AI, she said. “Not that it won’t ultimately be game changing, but that there could be too much investment right now and investors are going to demand ROI faster than people are willing to adopt — that’s probably the biggest risk.”