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Hello, Reader,

Tom Yeung here with today’s Smart Money.

Last year, over 315,000 Americans were injured in distracted driving accidents.

If a driver takes their eyes off the road for just five seconds to send a text, they would have driven the length of an entire football field at 55mph by the time they looked back up. At 75mph, they would have traveled two full city blocks.

Taking your eyes off the road can have serious consequences. The same is true for investing.

Markets have offered no shortage of distracting events lately. War in the Middle East… earnings announcements… oil prices… cybersecurity breaches…

Each of these stories is worth watching. But keep your head turned too long, and you risk missing out on an even bigger shift happening right in front of you.

The biggest shift right now is artificial intelligence, possibly the most consequential technology of our lifetimes.

Consultancy IDC estimates that AI will add $22.3 trillion cumulatively to the global economy through 2030, five times more than what India generates per year. And if anything, I suspect that figure will prove conservative. After all, the world’s workers collectively earn roughly $50 trillion in wages every year. If AI continues to improve at its current pace, it will soon compete for the single largest pool of money on Earth.

In other words, while investors are busy reacting to the latest headline, AI is quietly reshaping one of the biggest forces “driving” the economy: work itself.

So today, let’s keep our eyes on the road and follow the winding AI opportunity – from the jobs it will transform to the companies supplying the tools that will power what comes next.

The Future of Work

What would a world without tutors look like? Or accountants? Or even CEOs?

It’s a fair question because each of these jobs is already getting squeezed by AI.

Tutoring companies like Chegg Inc. (CHGG) and Nerdy Inc. (NRDY) have seen their share prices plummet since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. Over 80% of high school students report using AI for help with schoolwork, and almost 95% do at the college level.

Accountants face a double squeeze. The pipeline of new accounting graduates is shrinking, and AI bookkeeping software is only getting better. That’s causing business owners to offload busywork to AI accounting programs with buzzy names like “Digits,” “Xero,” and “Puzzle.”

Even the corner office isn’t safe. In 2022, Hong Kong-listed gaming firm NetDragon Websoft appointed an AI-powered virtual CEO named Tang Yu to run its flagship subsidiary. The company’s shares went on to outperform the Hang Seng index in the months that followed. Tang Yu, it should be noted, did not require a corporate jet.

“Fine,” says the skeptic. “White-collar work goes digital. But AI can’t rewire a house. Learn a trade!”

For now, that’s true. But I’d encourage the skeptics to spend five minutes watching videos of Unitree’s humanoid robots dancing, boxing, and doing backflips. The Chinese firm shipped 5,500 of these machines last year and is targeting annual production rates of 190,000 units.

And here’s the thing: these robots can learn new tricks.

Unitree itself already offers an app store called “UniStore” where users can download new skills for their robot. And the store is designed to support a whole range of future abilities, including camera tracking, grasp detection, and other job-related skills.

That means it’s only a matter of time before every blue-collar job could face its own “ChatGPT moment” as new skills are added to a robotic app store.

Now, none of this is a doomsday forecast. In 1900, about 40% of Americans worked on farms; today, less than 2% do. Technological displacement is a very old story, and it has always created enormous wealth.

 However, the 20th century barely paid the people picking the crops. It paid the people who owned the tractors.

So, if robots become the new machines doing the work, the biggest opportunities may lie with the companies supplying the “tractors” of the AI Revolution.

Buying the AI Revolution

A logical question to then ask is: How does one buy a tractor dealership in 2026?

The obvious answer is to try investing in the robot and AI developers themselves. But the problem is that most of them aren’t for sale.

OpenAI and Anthropic are private companies. And the AI startups that do go public often charge sky-high prices for their shares… if you’re lucky enough to land any at all. Unitree said on Monday that its $900 million Shanghai initial public offering was more than 8,000 times oversubscribed. That means the average investor requesting 8,000 shares would only receive 1.

For now, ordinary investors are locked out of the showroom.

Fortunately, there are still ways to invest in the AI Revolution without getting burned.

Consider Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), a company Eric recommended in 2025. The chip designer had long existed in the shadow of Intel Corp. (INTC) and almost went bankrupt in the mid-2010s before current CEO Lisa Su took over.

Then came the turnaround. The struggling AMD soon inked deals with PlayStation and Xbox to sell gaming chips, and then poured the cash into designing a new type of chip called “Zen.”

Zen architecture turned out to be fantastic. It was modular, relatively easy to manufacture and fast – exactly the qualities AI datacenters needed.

That meant investors did not have to pay high prices to buy up companies like OpenAI… or even Nvidia Corp. (NVDA), which was already a $420 billion company when ChatGPT was launched in late 2022. Instead, they could snap up a turnaround chipmaker at a massive discount and own the company making the “tractor engines” of the AI Revolution.

The Next Stage of the AI Revolution

Of course, AMD’s value has now been discovered. The company is worth almost $800 billion, and Eric sold the stock later that year for a quick triple-digit gain.

But the AI Revolution will provide plenty more triple-digit opportunities in places you least expect.

I’m talking about the rare earth magnets needed in every robotic joint…

Every custom chip used in a “hyperscale” AI datacenter…

Every new solar panel that powers these devices…

And that’s why Eric spent months working with InvestorPlace Senior Analysts Louis Navellier and Luke Lango to identify the companies positioned to power this next stage.

And next Wednesday, August 19, at 10 a.m. Eastern, they’ll be holding a special event to discuss why they expect the AI Revolution to continue. They’ll also reveal their brand-new tool that can help investors properly allocate their AI portfolios.

Plus, Louis will be making a huge announcement about a new role he’ll be taking on.

Click here to reserve your spot for the special event now.

 Until next time,

Thomas Yeung, CFA

Market Analyst, InvestorPlace