After Accenture $ACN (+1,59%) fell by 18% (the stock dropped yesterday to its lowest level since 2017), the entire (consulting) industry was dragged down with it. Capgemini
$CAP (-0,66%) lost 11 percent. Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro, EPAM and Globant were trading lower. Why? Accenture’s business model is based on billable hours. It deploys talented professionals who implement software, restructure processes, and maintain systems at client sites. It is precisely these hours that AI is taking over.
The AI revolution already has its winners and losers. Goldman Sachs has created two thematic portfolios. In the GS US Broad AI includes 94 companies benefiting from AI. The GS AI at Risk contains companies vulnerable to AI, comprising a total of 45 stocks.
Both portfolios start from the same starting point—late November 2022 —after ChatGPT had taken the world by storm—to the present.
The result is clear: The winning portfolio is up 410 percent. That translates to an annualized return of 59 percent per year. The Loser basket stands at minus 26 percent over the same period. That’s a loss of 7 percent per year. The gap between the two stands at around 440 percentage points.
The big winners are the fiber-optic specialist Applied Optoelectronics , up 7,200 percent, SanDisk , up 6,000 percent, and the hard drive manufacturer Western Digital up 2,600 percent, Seagate up 1,900 percent, and Micron up 1,900 percent.
Next up is data center hardware. Celestica rose 3,200 percent, and the cooling and power specialist Vertiv up 2,300 percent, and the equipment manufacturer Argan rose 1,800 percent. Even the laggards in this group of winners are barely in the red. They are the energy providers NextEra, Dominion , and Xcel.
On the other hand, the losers are Globant , down 84 percent, Concentrix down 80 percent, and the payment service provider Bill Holdings down 73 percent, DXC Technology down 71 percent, and the data giant Gartner down 64 percent, the recruitment firm Robert Half and ManpowerGroup each down about 60 percent, and the learning platform Coursera down 62 percent, and Accenture down 57 percent since the end of 2022.
Among the losers, however, there are a few standouts—and they offer valuable lessons. One language AI specialist, SoundHound AI
$SOUN gained 456 percent. Duolingo
$DUOL rose 80 percent, and Verisign
$VRSN (+0,07%) rose by 32 percent. These companies didn’t just put up with AI—they turned it into their own driving force. Duolingo uses AI to make language learning cheaper and more effective. SoundHound has become AI itself. The lesson is: You have to reinvent yourself—and do so faster than AI can eat away at your old revenue.
Source: "Welt" (excerpt), June 19, 2026
