Descriptions:
Lori Keefe, portfolio manager and senior analyst at Parnassus Investments, makes the case to Bloomberg Tech that investors don’t need to concentrate in mega-cap technology names to profit from the AI build-out. Her thesis centers on mid-cap stocks — companies she argues offer more valuation room (trading around 17x earnings versus 21x for large caps) and less sector concentration than the S&P 500’s top ten holdings.
Keefe identifies two distinct opportunity buckets. The first is infrastructure enablers: companies supplying power equipment, water treatment, and grid modernization technology that data centers require at scale. She highlights Hubbell as a leading example — a grid-equipment provider whose pre-existing business is being meaningfully accelerated by AI data center demand. The second bucket covers enterprise software companies using AI to drive genuine operating leverage, with Robinhood cited as a case study: the fintech firm now handles roughly 75% of its customer service calls through AI, delivering measurable cost and margin benefits.
The conversation touches on the valuation dispersion within mid-cap indexes, the challenge of stock-picking in a more diverse field than the “Magnificent Seven,” and why Keefe believes the user-side adoption story — beyond pure compute and memory plays — is still in its early innings and represents the longer-tail opportunity over a five-to-ten-year horizon.
📺 Source: Bloomberg Tech · Published August 13, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
