5 big analyst AI moves: Apple lifted to Buy, AI chip bets reassessed
Investing.com -- Wells Fargo has initiated coverage of 18 small and mid-cap software stocks, with analysts calling artificial intelligence a major turning point for the sector.
“Investors are missing just how good AI is now in software,” Wells Fargo said, noting that “agents now do the work for you.”
The firm argued that agentic coding, where AI systems can plan and execute complex tasks across a codebase, marks the “first AI SaaS breakthrough.”
Introduced in February 2025, the technology “automates work and performs like a developer,” and is already “supercharging developer productivity.”
Among its initiations, Wells Fargo rated MongoDB, Snowflake, Datadog and Dynatrace at Overweight, alongside names such as HubSpot, Monday.com, Atlassian and Braze.
Confluent, Twilio and Klaviyo were also initiated at Overweight. The bank set Equal Weight ratings on Elastic, GitLab, Freshworks, RingCentral, Zoom and Five9, while ZoomInfo was started at Underweight.
Wells Fargo highlighted the accelerating adoption of AI tools. LangChain downloads are running at “78M/mo, from 32M/mo to start 2025 (+140%) with 3x more mentions in job postings.” MongoDB downloads on the platform are up 400% this year.
The bank added that Claude Code, an AI coding tool, has seen 21 million-plus downloads in August, compared with 650,000 in March. “Rakuten reduced time-to-market for new features by 79% (24 to 5 days),” the analysts wrote, while Zapier has used Claude to show design concepts in real time.
The bank expects infrastructure vendors such as MongoDB, Datadog and Dynatrace to benefit as AI-native startups scale.
“Interacting with AI agents will be a core daily workflow,” Wells Fargo said, predicting broader monetisation across both infrastructure and SaaS applications.