artificial intelligence is the hottest area of the stock market right now a screen of five etfs points to a list of highly favored companies there are always fads in the stock market but now we are in the midst of what could turn out to be a revolutionary trend that will last much longer than any fad  artificial intelligence in the need to know column on feb 9 edward stanley who leads a team of strategists at morgan stanley was quoted calling ai the real deal generative ai now popularized by chatgpt is showing all the usual hallmarks of hype he wrote but then he added that something suggests the ai hype is worth considering seriously calling it the fastest platform to a million users and fastest to 100 million site views stanley called generative ai a serious contender for tech diffusion with real market impact potential when screening companies by business focus it helps to have an industry label such as semiconductors such isnt the case for ai one easy way to jump on the trend bandwagon would be to purchase shares of microsoft corp msft which provided 1 billion in funding for openai when it began to develop chatgpt and is now ponying up billions more microsoft has been demonstrating how it will integrate chatgpt with its bing search engine relatedgoogles stock dips on demonstration of its ai chatbot bard for a new screen of airelated stocks we began by looking at the holdings of five exchangetraded funds with ai in their names taking all the stocks held by the etfs together we narrowed the list to 96 stocks held by at least two of the funds we then narrowed further to 88 companies covered by at least five analysts polled by factset among those 88 companies 30 are rated a buy by at least 75 of analysts covering the stocks sometimes price targets can get ahead of analysts targets especially in such a hot area of the stock market so we have narrowed the list further to the 20 stocks for which analysts see the most upside potential over the next 12 months based on consensus price targets prices and targets are in local currencies where the stocks are listed click the tickers for more about each company or etf click here for tomi kilgores detailed guide to the wealth of information for free on the marketwatch quote page dont misssell your bank of america shares now says kbw