Investors hoping to capture more upside from artificial intelligence could turn to a sector that is underperformed this 12 months, and possibly not immediately related to AI: Health care. A handful of enormous tech names surged in the primary half due to a mania for all things tied to artificial intelligence. Apple, for instance, last week closed with a $3 trillion market capitalization for the primary time. Nvidia is up by nearly 200% in 2023. Going forward, a few of those gains might spill over to health care, which has underperformed this 12 months. The sector is the third weakest out of 11 within the S & P 500, down about 3% 12 months so far. “A whole lot of people discuss AI-powered performance and the way that is going to affect the tech sector. And I believe that is well understood,” said Jamie Cox, managing partner for Harris Financial Group. “But what lots of people fail to understand is that artificial intelligence and quantum computing are literally going to have probably the most impact on health care.” Greater drug discovery The bull case for health care boils all the way down to several aspects including improvements made in drug discovery. In line with a June note from Morgan Stanley, a 2.5% boost in early stage development success rates could mean a virtually 10% increase in recent drug approvals over the subsequent decade. Actually, the Wall Street firm expects that 60 additional drugs developed over 10 years could have an additional $70 billion in net present value (NPV) for the biopharma sector. NPV calculates the present value of a future stream of payments from a project or investment. “Higher probability of success and faster cycle times could boost investor perception of Biopharma business/revenue durability and shut the P/E valuation gap” against more highly-valued sectors, the Morgan Stanley note read. Morgan Stanley highlighted plenty of biopharma picks that may gain advantage from the trend, including pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson , Merck and Pfizer , all three of which have fallen in 2023. The bank also named the U.S.-listed shares of Exscientia , a U.K.-based company that designs and discovers possible drugs using AI. Cox added that one neglected health care and AI beneficiary can be Amazon , which he called a “sleeper” pick for investors. Amazon, which is already higher by 55% this 12 months partly owing to AI enthusiasm, has a growing pharmaceutical and first care business. This 12 months, it closed a $3.9 billion transaction for primary health care provider One Medical . In 2018, Amazon bought PillPack in a $750 million transaction and launched its own online pharmacy. “That is the corporate that is essentially focused on automation and efficiency, and the accrual of productivity gains to them is just not well understood at this point,” Cox said. The investor also called Rockwell Automation one in every of his stock picks that may gain advantage from AI in health care. The commercial stock is already up greater than 25% this 12 months. Recently, Mizuho said Rockwell also works as a play on the “reshoring” theme, whereby manufacturing returns to the U.S. UnitedHealth Group was one other stock pick that Cox said would profit from integration of artificial intelligence in health care. “The last decade of health care is upon us,” Cox said. “A whole lot of it’s due to the R & D that happened from the pandemic but one other a part of it’s that the AI components are literally going to accrue more so to healthcare than they’re even to tech.”