Episode
AI’s Next Stress Test
- Podcast
- Thoughts on the Market
- Published
- Jul 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 731
- Processing state
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Summary
The biggest AI stocks have had a remarkable run – but questions still remain. Our Head of Americas Specialty Sales, Thomas Wigg, speaks with Global Head of Thematic and Sustainability Research Stephen Byrd and Global Head of Public Policy Research Ariana Salvatore about the competition and durability of the investment cycle. Read more insights from Morgan Stanley. ----- Transcript ----- Thomas Wigg: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Tom Wigg, Morgan Stanley's Head of Americas Specialty Sales. Stephen Byrd: I'm Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley's Global Head of Thematic and Sustainability Research. Ariana Salvatore: And I'm Ariana Salvatore, Morgan Stanley's Head of Public Policy Research. Thomas Wigg: Today, the rally in AI CapEx beneficiaries has taken a breather in recent weeks on concerns of competition from open-source models, backlash to token-maxxing, and growing political opposition to data center builds. It's Tuesday, July 7th at 10am in New York. Let's start with you, Stephen. There's a lot of discussion recently around a backlash at token-maxxing. Essentially, enterprises trying to curtail their high spending on AI tokens from the frontier labs, and, in many cases, shifting to cheaper open-source China models. Can you first offer some perspective here on the value of tokens for enterprises? I know you have a popular token factory model that walks through the economics of agents. Stephen Byrd: Yeah, Tom, we do have this model that really walks through token economics, both from the adopter side as well as the hyperscaler side. So, let's do the adopter side. So, there's a study out that shows a whole range of enterprise use cases of AI, and the average single use case that they identify would save a company…