Wall Street's chief techno-optimist names 5 stocks to buy in the "soft-apocalypse"

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, known for his optimism about the technology sector, advised investors to buy out the securities of the leaders of the corporate software market, which have fallen sharply in price due to the threat to their business models from artificial intelligence. In the analyst's opinion, the market is wrongly assuming a catastrophic scenario in the quotations, as businesses will not abandon proven suppliers en masse for the sake of startups.

Ives included Microsoft, Palantir Technologies, CrowdStrike, Snowflake and Salesforce in his top five most attractive stocks in the "software apocalypse", CNBC reports. They have fallen in price by 9-19% this week alone, and have lost between 19% and 29% since the start of 2026, the channel notes.

Ives acknowledged that AI does create problems for the software sector, but the scale of the current sell-off is "seriously perplexing" to him. He argues that the market is putting a "doomsday scenario into quotes that is far from reality."

Wedbush's analyst believes that corporate clients who have already spent a lot of money on building and fine-tuning their IT infrastructure will not immediately abandon old, proven software vendors. He also pointed out that new players - AI startups like Anthropic and OpenAI - do not yet have the capacity to store the full amount of corporate data needed to integrate AI into business processes, nor are they able to provide protection against malware.

According to FactSet, the Wall Street favorites are Microsoft and Snowflake: both companies have a consensus rating of Buy. Technology giant Microsoft has 60 Buy or Overweight recommendations, with four Neutral (Hold). Snowflake's position is also strong, with 44 votes in favor with seven Holds and no Sell recommendations. The consensus on Salesforce, CrowdStrike and Palantir is "above market" (Overweight, also a Buy recommendation). Palantir is the most strongly divided on Palantir, with 13 analysts recommending buying the stock, 14 recommending hold, and three recommending sell (Sell or Underweight).

The market sees the greatest potential for growth in Snowflake and Salesforce: average target prices ($286.3 and $328) imply share appreciation by 83% and 73%, respectively. From Microsoft securities analysts on average expect a rise of 53% to $602. The consensus on CrowdStrike and Palantir is a bit more modest: experts forecast their growth from current quotations by 47-48%.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor