A single trading session can crystallize the broader narrative gripping technology investors: artificial intelligence is simultaneously the greatest opportunity and the greatest threat that companies in this space face. Three names — Figma, Applied Materials, and ServiceNow — illustrate the spectrum of how that tension is playing out, from existential anxiety to validated growth to strategic reinvention.
Figma: From Feared Disruption to Demonstrated Demand
Figma's results offered a striking rebuttal to one of the most persistent fears hanging over creative software companies. The design platform reported revenue of $333.4 million, up 46% year-over-year, comfortably topping expectations. More telling than the headline beat was the acceleration embedded in it: growth climbed from 40% in the prior quarter to 46%, signaling that demand is not merely holding but strengthening. Adjusted earnings came in at 10 cents per share, also ahead of forecasts, and management raised its full-year revenue outlook by roughly $55 million.
That guidance raise matters because of the specific worry it addresses. Companies like this — and peers such as Adobe — have been pressured by the thesis that AI would be a destroyer rather than an aid, hollowing out demand for design tools by automating the work itself. Figma's numbers suggest the opposite dynamic is unfolding. Customers are proving willing to pay more for AI-powered features, and the company's AI users have continued buying and actively engaging with the platform. In other words, AI is functioning as a monetization lever, not a wrecking ball.
The recovery, however, is far from complete. Even with shares rallying around 8% on the news, the stock remains down roughly 80% on a year-over-year basis. That gap is a reminder of how severely the market punished the company on AI-disruption fears, and how long the road back will be even when fundamentals improve. A strong quarter can change the trajectory; it does not erase the damage already priced in.
Applied Materials: Profit-Taking on an Intact Story
Applied Materials presents a different lesson — one about the difference between a stock's short-term move and a company's long-term story. The company beat on both lines, posting adjusted earnings of $2.86 per share against a street estimate of $2.68, on revenue above $7.9 billion. The standout was guidance: management projected roughly 35% growth in the coming quarter, with Q3 earnings per share guided to around $3.36, up about 35% year-over-year, and a revenue outlook of $8.45 billion to $9.45 billion — all ahead of expectations.
Despite this, shares initially rose and then slipped, trading down about half a percent. The pullback was modest and, importantly, not a referendum on the business. The stock has run roughly 70% higher this year, and after a week of records across the broader benchmarks and individual names, some investors appear to be simply taking profits. The underlying picture remains robust: customers such as Taiwan Semiconductor and Micron are ramping capacity, driving a multi-year growth cycle. Analysts largely remain believers, several adjusting price targets upward.
The deeper point is structural. Applied Materials makes the machines that make the chips, which places it at a foundational layer of the entire AI buildout. When demand for AI infrastructure expands, it flows back through the equipment makers that enable semiconductor manufacturing. A half-percent dip on a day of broader market pressure does nothing to alter that position — the AI story here is clearly still intact.
ServiceNow: Reinvention Through Autonomous Agents
ServiceNow demonstrates a third path: navigating headwinds not through earnings alone but through strategic positioning. The software sector has been hit hard, and ServiceNow was not spared. Yet the stock rose about 3% on the announcement of a multi-year partnership with Experian focused on scaling AI-driven automation.
The substance of the deal is what makes it notable. Experian's data and decisioning tools will be plugged into ServiceNow's AI platform, with the aim of bringing smarter, faster decision-making into business workflows. Critically, this is not framed as another chatbot integration. The vision is one of autonomous AI agents that do not merely analyze but act — making decisions, triggering workflows, and operating without human input. This positions ServiceNow at the frontier of where enterprise AI is heading: from assistive tools toward systems that execute independently.
A Common Thread
Across all three companies, the same force is at work, refracted differently. For Figma, AI was the feared disruptor that has so far proven to be a revenue driver. For Applied Materials, AI is the secular tailwind powering a multi-year cycle, untroubled by a single day's profit-taking. For ServiceNow, AI is the strategic lever for reinvention amid a battered sector. The market's reactions — an 8% rally still 80% underwater, a half-percent dip on great guidance, a 3% jump on a partnership — show that investors are not pricing AI uniformly. They are weighing, company by company, whether artificial intelligence will build the business or break it. The early evidence from this group leans toward building.