Microsoft, Cognizant News Leads Rush of AI Adoption Progress

We are seeing multiple developments on the AI front as we get ready to close out the week. These developments, which look to spur enterprise and consumer adoption as well as usage, keep us bullish on the Portfolio’s positioning.

Cognizant and Microsoft

We’ve talked quite a bit of late about AI adoption in the enterprise, including why we see ServiceNow (NOW) as being well-positioned to address certain pain points. In that alert, we reminded folks not to forget about Microsoft (MSFT) when it comes to AI, and shortly thereafter, Microsoft gave us another reason to remain bullish.

It is teaming with Cognizant (CTSH) in a multi-year agreement to help enterprises in the fields of financial services, healthcare and life sciences, retail and manufacturing to harness artificial intelligence-powered solutions.

Before we read too much into this, Cognizant also recently partnered with Anthropic to use its family of large language models to accelerate AI adoption across enterprise customers and its own internal teams. Cognizant isn’t the first company to tap multiple AI model partners, and odds are others will as they look to engage their customers with their preferred AI model platform.

From a 10,000-foot view, we see partnerships like these leading companies to overcome AI adoption pain points, driving usage higher. That keeps us bullish on the Portfolio’s AI positioning.

Meta Readies Fresh AI Model for Video

Reports indicate that Meta (META) may unveil a new image- and video-focused AI model referred to as “Mango,” as well as another model referred to as “Avocado” in the first half of 2026.

Mango is expected to accelerate Meta’s move into multimodal AI. To be blunt, when OpenAI and Walt Disney (DIS) announced plans to allow the use of Disney characters in short-form AI-generated videos on OpenAI’s Sora platform, we expected we would be hearing more on this front.

Earlier this month, we discussed how the usage of AI-generated video could drive data center and digital infrastructure capacity utilization levels higher, fostering the need for even more capacity. We continue to think there will be further announcements as others push into this front, which should be constructive for the Portfolio’s holdings. However, the real catalyst that we’ll be watching will be metrics for AI-generated video.

ChatGPT App Store Now Open

Back in October, OpenAI announced the Apps SDK at DevDay in October, and the platform is now live with early partners including Booking.com (BKNG) , Canva, Coursera (COUR) , Expedia (EXPE) , Figma (FIG) , Spotify (SPOT) and Zillow (Z) .

As we see, there are two obvious targets for what OpenAI is aiming to do. First, help stimulate consumer adoption of AI and ChatGPT in particular. That goes hand in hand with the second target, which is to keep users inside ChatGPT to complete the task or “workflow” rather than moving to another app or website.

For now, digital goods, subscriptions and in-app purchases are not yet permitted, but OpenAI says it is exploring additional options. We suspect that as OpenAI barrels toward the eventual IPO, it will have figured out some of these options. In the meantime, partners can only monetize by linking out to external websites for physical goods.

Here too, odds are that OpenAI won’t be the only one to come to market with such a solution. Given their existing relationships in digital advertising, we could envision similar efforts from Alphabet (GOOGL) and Meta.

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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long NOW, MSFT, META and GOOGL.