PARAT (Private-Sector AI-Related Activity Tracker), ETO's latest tool, brings together diverse data on AI research publications, patents, and hiring by hundreds of leading companies around the world, including every company in the S&P 500. Analyzing the AI activity of America's biggest publicly listed companies is as easy as a few clicks in the PARAT interface.
In this post, we'll share insights from our own recent exploration of PARAT's S&P 500 metrics. We used PARAT's built-in filters and export function to pull relevant data together, then processed the data for presentation here with some basic tools (Excel and Datawrapper) - no PhD required.
To dig into PARAT's S&P 500 data on your own, you can filter the PARAT interface by industry or AI activity metric - or export results for use in your favorite data analysis tool. (For power users interested in working with the entire PARAT source dataset all at once, check out our Private-Sector AI Indicators page.)
Big Tech tops our AI activity metrics - along with more surprising leaders
Focusing in on three core PARAT metrics - the number of recent AI-related publications, patents, and jobs linked to each S&P 500 company - we see many familiar Big Tech names at or near the top of the list, including Microsoft, Alphabet, IBM and others.
But other leaders are a little more surprising. Amazon, often considered behind the curve in AI, stands out for the huge number of AI-skilled workers it employs, along with IT consulting giants Cognizant and Accenture. Many less tech-focused corporations are also solidly within the S&P 500's top tier, representing industries from finance to transportation. Walmart is hardly known for AI, but according to PARAT's data, the retail giant boasts hundreds of AI-related patents and publications and well over a thousand employees likely to be working on AI projects.
AI activity spans industries
PARAT includes sectoral information for most S&P 500 companies, so it's straightforward to group our analysis by industries, rather than individual companies. Unsurprisingly, "Software and IT" and "Technology Equipment" lead the list, but less predictable trends are also evident. For example, retail and finance companies employ lots of AI-skilled workers on average, while retail and automotive companies put up impressive numbers for AI publications.
At a broader level, it's clear from this data that S&P 500 companies of all sorts are active in AI to some extent. Even in less tech-centric sectors like consumer goods or energy, S&P 500 companies tend to have at least a few AI-related publications and patents, and dozens or hundreds of AI-skilled workers. And the most AI-active companies in those sectors may have extensive AI operations. The energy and utilities sector sits relatively low on our list overall, for example, but according to PARAT, sectoral leader ExxonMobil has dozens of AI publications and patents, and nearly 500 employees likely to be working directly on AI.
America's AI leaders face fierce global competition
S&P 500 companies are generally headquartered in the U.S., making them a decent representation of America's heaviest hitters in AI. But PARAT also includes data on many global multinationals with active AI programs. Below, we've plotted AI publication and patent data for leading S&P 500 companies against their global competitors. (We don't have reliable workforce data for companies outside the United States, so jobs numbers are omitted.) The axes of this chart are logarithmic, meaning that numbers rise increasingly fast as you move down the axes.
For us, two things jump out from this chart. First, there's a small elite of companies with thousands of AI patents and publications (the top right quadrant of the chart). Tech titans from the U.S. (Microsoft, Alphabet, IBM) and China (Huawei, Tencent, Baidu) put up the biggest numbers in this group, which also includes some notable players from Europe and elsewhere in East Asia (Samsung, Bosch, Siemens, Toyota).
Second, the S&P 500 - and, by extension, the American private sector - has no monopoly on AI. Foreign firms sit side by side with U.S. heavyweights throughout the chart, with many lesser-known foreign firms - often but not always Chinese - producing as many or more AI publications and patents as major American tech corporations.
This analysis uses just a few of PARAT's many AI activity metrics. To explore further or conduct more focused analysis, give PARAT a spin today at https://parat.eto.tech. It's ready to answer questions like:
- Show me some companies with more than a hundred AI patents and more than a hundred AI research publications. How about companies with lots of AI patents and very few research publications?
- How much AI research have Microsoft, Anthropic, General Motors, Baidu, or Procter & Gamble been releasing?
- About how big is Walmart's AI workforce as compared to Google's? What about OpenAI, Morgan Stanley, or UPS?
- Show me some Asian and European companies that have been filing AI-related life sciences patents.
As always, feel free to contact us with any questions, or drop by for live support during our standing office hours. Good luck exploring! 🦜