We recently published a list of 10 AI Stocks Making Waves: GTC Highlights & Beyond. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) stands against other AI stocks that are making waves with insights on GTC highlights.

A new open-source model from Mistral AI is shaking things up in the tech world. This groundbreaking model outperforms comparable models like Gemma 3 and GPT-4o Mini, delivering inference speeds of 150 tokens per second. Mistral Small 3.1 surpasses the performance of leading small proprietary models across dimensions such as handling text, understanding multimodal inputs, supporting multiple languages, and managing long contexts, all that with low latency and cost efficiency.

Shifting focus to China, Tencent has recently captured attention with its suite of new artificial intelligence tools capable of converting text and images into 3D visuals. The company has released five open-source models based on its Hunyuan3D-2.0 technology, including “turbo” versions that can generate 3D visuals within 30 seconds while maintaining high precision and quality.

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Like many other Chinese firms, Tencent is advancing China’s position in the AI arms race by expanding its capital expenditures. According to Tencent President Martin Lau, capital spending would rise to the “low teens” as a percentage of revenue, and artificial intelligence will be a key focus of strategic investments.

“We will continue to increase our AI investments, increasing investment in our proprietary Hunyuan model while expanding our contributions in multimodal and open-source capabilities.” –Martin Lau.

Meanwhile, once an AI leader in China, Baidu is also striving hard to regain its position in the tech world. The company has released two new free-to-use artificial intelligence models, including its first reasoning-focused model. The move comes ahead of its plans to move toward an open-source strategy.

According to an article by The Financial Times on why China is suddenly flooding the markets with AI models, retaliation appears to be the driving force. When the US tightened its grip on advanced artificial intelligence technologies in January, it blocked off China’s access to advanced AI chips and locked proprietary models behind trade barriers.

Even though it seemed that China would retaliate by doubling down on secrecy, it’s doing quite the opposite, and with good reason. Chinese tech groups are seemingly creating an ecosystem where developers can continuously revamp their models. Provided open-source becomes powerful enough, there would be no reason to pay for closed models if free, equally capable alternatives exist.

For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds. The hedge fund data is as of Q4 2024.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points  (see more details here).

Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 79

Accenture plc (NYSE:ACN) offers strategy and consulting services. On March 17, the company announced that it has expanded its AI Refinery™ platform by launching an AI agent builder, allowing business users to quickly build and customize agents. The company is also expanding its collection of pre-configured industry agent solutions to allow clients to scale networks of AI agents across the enterprise. Accenture plans to develop more than 50 industry-specific AI agent solutions in the coming months, and more than 100 solutions by the end of the year.

The new Agent Builder is part of the AI Refinery and is built on Nvidia AI Enterprise, Nvidia’s end-to-end, cloud-native software platform. Clients will be able to create and customize agent teams driven by changing business needs and market conditions, and that too, without the need coding for or waiting for support from engineering or technical teams.

“We are seizing the significant opportunity to help our clients prioritize bold, high-impact initiatives that tackle core business challenges by reinventing processes end-to-end with generative AI and agentic technology. Accenture continues to double-down on new innovations like agent builder on our AI Refinery platform to empower organizations and decision-makers with the flexibility to drive business value faster, with agents that can observe the environment, apply reason, continuously improve and take action.”

-Lan Guan, chief AI officer, Accenture.

Overall, ACN ranks 8th on our list of AI stocks that are making waves with insights on GTC highlights. While we acknowledge the potential of ACN as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than ACN but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.