Jim Cramer Shares Hot Take on Nike (NKE) & Elliott Vs Elliott

The market is treating “AI” as a single trade, but the more interesting edge is in the plumbing and distribution layers where pricing power is still underappreciated. If model capability continues to commoditize, the monetization shifts away from the obvious chip leader set and toward the firms that control enterprise workflows, cloud consumption, and deployment friction. That is the setup where a company with broad install base and low-friction integration can quietly capture more dollar value per unit of AI usage than the headline names.

The second-order winner is likely not the most expensive infrastructure supplier, but the ecosystem player that can cross-sell AI into existing enterprise relationships and internalize usage across search, productivity, commerce, and cloud. That creates a path to margin expansion even if unit economics on standalone AI services compress. Conversely, the biggest risk for the narrative-heavy names is that AI spend becomes more cyclically scrutinized once capex growth outruns measurable revenue conversion; that would hit multiples first and fundamentals later.

There is also a positioning problem: the trade is increasingly crowded in the obvious beneficiaries, while smaller “picks and shovels” beneficiaries with cleaner valuation support are still under-owned. If the market rotates from pure model scarcity to distribution and monetization, under-owned platforms can outperform even without being the technological frontier. The key catalyst is not a breakthrough model, but visible evidence that AI usage is converting into higher ARPU, lower churn, or faster workflow adoption over the next 2-3 quarters.

The contrarian miss is that the long-term upside may be real, but the near-term payoff could be less linear than implied. A wave of enthusiasm can still coexist with multiple compression if growth decelerates or if investors conclude that current capex levels are pulling demand forward. That argues for owning the monetizers, not just the enablers, and for avoiding the most crowded expressions until there is proof of operating leverage.