artificial intelligence will be a catalyst for big tech stocks in the next five years according to bank of america the sector has been beaten down in 2022 thanks to macro factors including inflation and rising interest rates the techheavy nasdaq composite is down 25 this year compared with the s  p 500 s nearly 12 drop however artificial intelligence is the backbone of the internet and will be increasingly tied to the stock performance of big tech companies bank of america analyst justin post said ai and machine learning will be a critical driver of all things internet including content relevance ad performance ecommerce conversion marketplace efficiency and even customer service he wrote in a note monday aiml technology is important across all internet subsectors media commerce  transportation and those companies that can effectively utilize this technology internally developed or through cloud providers can build competitive advantages big tech is investing heavily in ai with capex investments from the three largest internet companies meta  alphabet and amazon  reaching 40 billion in 2023 he said he sees those three plus airbnb and uber  as the biggest beneficiaries in this environment meta meta has been committed to investing in ai since 2013 and its new supercomputer ai research center cluster rsc is expected to be the worlds fastest ai computer once it is complete post said rsc will help the facebook parent advance in a number of areas including seamlessly analyzing images video and text together and helping develop new augmented reality tools he said meta has indicated that ai capacity primarily for its advertising business is driving the majority of its 20222023 capex spending post added meta also uses ai to predict what content will matter to users in their news feeds as well as to determine suggested content in its video component reels the stock has tumbled nearly 64 year to date alphabet artificial intelligence has become alphabets focus across its investments acquisitions and internal spending post said the google parents ukbased ai research lab deepmind technologies is responsible for its generalpurpose artificial intelligence technology including google assistant and personalized app recommendations in google play alphabet has also used deepmind to improve power efficiency in its data centers he said noting that deepminds revenue more than tripled from 2019 to 2020 ai also plays an important role in search and youtube since 2016 alphabet has invested about 120 billion in capex to ai its stock has lost about 31 so far this year amazon the ecommerce giant uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to power alexa go store and its recommendation engine data from these three main pillars of the company work together to create a cohesive customer experience post wrote alexas ecosystem also powers a broader market with multiple hardware ventures that integrate with alexa and its ambient intelligence he added ai is also used to forecast customer demand assess product availability and enhance delivery routes in addition amazon capitalizes on its machinelearning capabilities through amazon web services its cloud offering post said amazon does not disclose the percent of capex investment post said but based on amazons past comments he believes it is likely a large and growing share of total capex shares are down more than 45 year to date airbnb artificial intelligence is used throughout airbnb including in its search algorithms the vacationrental platform uses more than 100 factors to determine how a listing appears in search results post said it also helps hosts optimize pricing using variables including hotel rates seasons and local events the company recently launched a platform to allow renters to host apartments airbnb shares have lost nearly 41 year to date uber the ridesharing service uses ai in almost all its core functions which has resulted in considerable advances in demand prediction and network optimization that improves customer experience post said ai drives ubers matching algorithms and is used in its gps services to improve coverage speed and accuracy he added the stock is down almost 34 so far this year cnbcs michael bloom contributed reporting