The AI Winners May Not Be the Companies Building AI
"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
— Wayne Gretzky, the greatest ice hockey player in the history of the NHL
If you asked investors to name the three best-performing S&P 500 stocks of the AI boom, most would probably say Nvidia, Meta and another technology giant.
Nvidia would be right. The other two might surprise you.
Among the leaders are Comfort Systems, Nvidia and Vertiv — and Vertiv is a company with almost 80 years of history, rooted in something far less glamorous than artificial intelligence: power and cooling infrastructure.
Vertiv went public in 2021 with a market capitalization of less than $11 billion. Today, its value is in the region of $100 billion.
At first glance, it seems strange that one of the biggest beneficiaries of the generative AI revolution does not build AI models or GPUs.
It provides electricity and cooling.
And that is where one of the most interesting strategy lessons of the AI era begins:
The biggest winners of AI may not be the companies building AI. They may be the companies whose existing capabilities are being multiplied in value by AI.
Vertiv did not become an AI company
Vertiv does something much more mundane.
It provides the infrastructure that keeps data centers running: UPS systems, power distribution, air and liquid cooling, and other critical infrastructure.
If Nvidia builds the brain of AI, Vertiv provides the electricity and keeps the brain from overheating.
As AI computing has exploded, so has the demand for power and cooling. AI data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity and generate enormous amounts of heat.
The more powerful AI becomes, the more valuable the physical infrastructure around it becomes.
But there is an important nuance in Vertiv's story.
AI did not rescue a poorly performing company.
Vertiv had already begun transforming itself before the AI boom fully accelerated.
Before the wave arrives, learn how to surf
In 2021, Vertiv faced a paradox. Demand was growing. Orders were increasing. Its backlog was at record levels.
Yet the company was not converting that demand into profitability efficiently enough.
Pricing was too slow to respond to inflation. Supply chains were creating friction. Sales, operations and planning were not sufficiently connected.
The problem was not really strategy.
It was execution.
Vertiv began addressing those issues aggressively in 2022.
Pricing became more responsive. Supply-chain alternatives were developed. Sales, manufacturing and planning were better integrated. Accountability became clearer.
When Giordano Albertazzi became CEO in 2023, he focused the organization around five themes: customer focus, financial strength, innovation, operational excellence and high performance.
The results followed.
Revenue grew from approximately $5.7 billion in 2022 to more than $10 billion in 2025. Even more striking was the improvement in profitability, with operating margins rising from roughly 8% to more than 20%.
Vertiv became a better company before AI made its market exceptionally attractive.
And then the wave arrived.
You don't need to invent the megatrend. You need to be ready for it.
The explosive growth of AI computing created a new bottleneck: power and thermal management.
That happened to be exactly where Vertiv had decades of accumulated expertise, technology and customer relationships.
The company increased manufacturing capacity, invested in power and thermal-management technologies, and moved beyond selling individual components toward more integrated infrastructure solutions for AI data centers.
Today, Vertiv is working within the Nvidia ecosystem on power and cooling solutions for the next generation of AI infrastructure.
That distinction matters.
Vertiv did not wait for the future to arrive. It built capabilities the future would need.
This is one of the core ideas behind Jeff Bezos' concept of Day 1.
Large trends are rarely difficult to see. They are discussed everywhere.
The difficult part is acting on them early enough.
The biggest AI challenge may not be AI
This brings us to the question I find most interesting in the Vertiv story.
What happens to organizations when AI becomes ten times more capable over the next few years?
We are unlikely to suffer from a lack of information.
Quite the opposite.
AI can analyze markets, help develop strategy, prepare leadership meetings, analyze KPIs, generate OKRs and provide recommendations in seconds that once took days or weeks.
The cost of knowledge is falling dramatically.
But knowing what to do and being able to make an organization do it are two very different things.
If everyone has access to increasingly powerful AI models — and increasingly similar knowledge — competitive advantage moves somewhere else.
The question is no longer only:
Who knows more?
It becomes:
Who can learn, decide and change behavior faster?
And this is where things become uncomfortable for leaders.
Yesterday's competitive advantage may become tomorrow's standard feature in Microsoft, Google or OpenAI.
A strategy designed for the year ahead may already be outdated before the final PowerPoint slide is finished.
Organizations need to learn continuously.
This is perhaps the question every leadership team should be asking now:
If AI gives us better answers tomorrow, how quickly can our organization turn those answers into better decisions, new priorities and different behavior?
That is where execution becomes the real competitive advantage.
From strategy to behavior
This is the problem EMP365 is designed to solve.
EMP365 — The Growth Operating System — helps leadership teams build the rhythm and habits that turn strategy into execution.
Strategy becomes priorities. Priorities become measurable goals. Goals become actions. Progress is reviewed. The team learns, gives feedforward and adjusts the next move.
Then the cycle starts again the following week.
Not as another project. As a management rhythm.
The distinction is important. Most organizations do not struggle because they lack strategic ideas.
They struggle because the connection between what they know, what they have decided and what people actually do is too weak.
The strategy sits in one place. The goals sit somewhere else. Meetings happen somewhere else again. And the daily work gradually takes over.
The result is a familiar pattern: everyone is busy, but the organization is not necessarily moving faster toward its most important goals.
The organizations that win in an AI-driven world will need something different.
They will need the ability to continuously convert new information into coordinated action.
Why EMP365?
That's what EMP365 is built for.
If you want to see how a leadership team can turn strategy into a weekly execution rhythm, try EMP365 free for 30 days.
No long implementation project. No complicated transformation program.
Just a practical operating system for helping your team focus on what matters, execute consistently and learn faster.
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The organizational advantage AI cannot automate
McKinsey's research on People + Performance Winners offers an interesting perspective here.
The companies that consistently outperform do not rely only on having talented people. They build organizational capital — the leadership practices, systems and culture that allow individual capability to translate into collective performance.
Clear expectations. Ownership. Coaching. Alignment. Empowerment. Innovation.
The important point is that these are not isolated leadership initiatives.
They form a system of behavior.
And that system determines how quickly an organization can turn capability into results.
This is why the AI revolution may ultimately be less about technology than many leaders expect.
AI will continue to compress the time between a question and an answer.
But it cannot automatically compress the distance between an answer and organizational behavior.
That remains a leadership challenge.
Habit as a Service
This is why EMP365 should not be thought of as simply another piece of software.
AI is becoming exceptionally good at helping us understand:
What should we do?
EMP365 is designed to help teams build the habits required to answer the next question:
How do we make this the way we actually work?
That is a different category.
Habit as a Service.
The idea is simple. Vertiv built capabilities before the AI boom and was ready when the market accelerated. Every organization has the opportunity to do the same. You do not need to wait for the next Copilot release, the next breakthrough model or the moment your competitors have already changed.
Build the capability before you need it.
Vertiv builds the physical infrastructure AI needs to operate. EMP365 builds the execution infrastructure organizations need to compete in an AI-driven world. AI may give you and your competitors access to the same powerful answer tomorrow.
The winner will be the organization that can turn it into better behavior faster.
Turn Your Leadership Team Into High-Performing Execution Champions
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