Investing.com — UBS says AI has become “a defining feature of relative stock performance” in Europe, with enablers up 85% and adopters up 40% over the past three years, while stocks viewed as vulnerable to disruption have fallen 50%, highlighting a widening gap between beneficiaries and those at risk.
The bank uses AI-driven scoring to assess both opportunity and risk. “AI Risk Scores measure how vulnerable each company is to AI-driven substitution, margin pressure or regulatory friction,” it said in a note, flagging business models where AI “directly threatens the economic engine.”
High-risk names tend to show pricing pressure, easy-to-automate workflows or weak IP protection.
The most immediate disruption risk, UBS says, sits with labour or seat-based service providers. Companies such as , and rely heavily on selling people’s time.
AI can automate coding, support and matching tasks, which can “push prices down and reduce the amount of human work clients are willing to pay for” unless these firms pivot toward AI-powered or outcome-based services.
The MSCI Europe Software & Services Index has underperformed by 17% in the past month, as investors react to rapid advances in AI coding and automation, UBS notes.
Gatekeeper platforms also face mounting pressure. AI tools that aggregate information across websites reduce the need for companies to pay for listings or visibility on platforms such as and , unless those platforms can prove they deliver higher-quality leads or proprietary data that cannot be replicated.
Another area of concern is advertising and content businesses. UBS notes that AI “drastically lowers the cost of making ads and creative content,” potentially prompting clients to shift work in-house or rely on automated tools, weighing on traditional ad production and legacy TV formats.
Furthermore, IP custodians such as and are exposed if AI-generated content competes with proprietary material and erodes the value of existing rights.
More broadly, UBS flags a clear IT-sector divide between “structural winners and those facing disruption risks.” It contrasts labour-intensive or seat-based providers with deeply embedded enterprise platforms such as , which sits inside core enterprise architecture, is seeing 30% cloud growth as AI accelerates migrations and expects €2 billion in future cost savings.
Therefore, UBS believes the stock selection is essential to “distinguish genuinely disrupted names from early AI adopters delivering irreplaceable enterprise services.”
The bank also argues that investors have aggressively bought enablers and aggressively sold companies considered at risk, “sometimes too indiscriminately,” suggesting the next phase of the AI trade could shift toward adopters able to demonstrate measurable profitability improvements rather than pure infrastructure plays.