Technology continues to shape the world we live in, while the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) appears to be a game-changing phenomenon. Not surprisingly, tech companies have grown to become some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world.
Let's look at two leading technology stocks that investors should feel comfortable buying and holding for the next decade.
1. Alphabet
Trading at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of only 20.5 times 2025 analyst estimates, Alphabet(NASDAQ: GOOGL)(NASDAQ: GOOG) is arguably one of the biggest megacap technology bargains on the market. The company is the dominant leader in search, while also having the world's most-watched streaming service in YouTube and the third-largest cloud computing platform.
Through Google, YouTube, and its ad network, the company is the world's leading advertising platform, serving ads both on its own properties and third-party sites. Meanwhile, the company is embracing AI and has a big opportunity to profit from it.
Historically, Google has only served ads on 20% of its search queries, where it can direct users to useful products and services for which they are looking. For example, if you searched for "what is the best dishwasher," you'd get sponsored links to dishwashers for sales from retailers like Home Depot, Lowe's Companies, and Best Buy, as well as to review site Consumer Reports. Google would then only get paid if a user clicked on some of the links.
While some people consider AI a threat, it is actually more of an opportunity. In the future, Google should have the opportunity to monetize the 80% of traffic it wasn't previously serving ads to through new ad formats and sponsored ads within its AI Overviews. AI should also help it better target ads to its users, especially given the vast data and search history the company has.
It's also worth remembering that when it comes to competition, Google has both a large user and advertiser base. Competitors would need to accumulate both to become profitable, or will continue to just pile up losses in the future.
Alphabet is already greatly benefiting from AI in its cloud computing unit. Google Cloud is growing quickly, seeing revenue growth of 30% last quarter, while this high fixed-cost business has also hit a profitability inflection point, leading to a 142% surge in the unit's operating income.
The company is benefiting from organizations building out their own AI models and apps on its platform. Alphabet has also developed its own custom AI chip with the help of Broadcom, which helps both improve performance and creates cost efficiencies.
In addition to its market-leading businesses, Alphabet is also at the forefront of two emerging fields: quantum computing and autonomous driving. The company recently unveiled a big breakthrough in quantum computing with its Willow chip, while its Waymo unit is the only company offering paid robotaxi rides in the U.S.
All this makes Alphabet a great stock to buy and hold for the long term.
Image source: Getty Images
2. Salesforce
Another attractively priced leading technology company is Salesforce(NYSE: CRM), which trades at a forward P/E of around 24.5 times analysts' estimates for fiscal 2026 (ending January). The company has a history of being at the forefront of technological innovation by being one of the first companies to adopt the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
Today, it is the market leader in customer relationship management (CRM), where users can store and easily access all their customer information in one place. It has also moved into automation, analytics, and employee communication through its acquisitions of Mulesoft, Tableau, and Slack.
Meanwhile, Salesforce is looking to be at the forefront of the next big step forward in AI with agentic AI. Currently, much of the early work with AI has been generative AI, where users enter prompts to create content, whether that be text, image, or video. This can be seen with programs such as ChatGPT, Adobe's Firefly to create images, or Alphabet's Veo 2 text-to-video platform. With agentic AI, meanwhile, AI agents will autonomously go out and complete tasks on your behalf with little human intervention.
On this front, Salesforce recently introduced its autonomous AI agent platform Agentforce in October. Agentforce offers a number of out-of-the-box AI agents that can handle specific tasks, such as assisting customers with billing and transaction disputes, or helping patients schedule and cancel doctor's appointments.
It also provides low-code and no-code tools so that users can customize its AI agents for specific tasks. The company has said that if you can describe the task in words, Agentforce can create an AI agent to handle the task.
Thus far, Agentforce has gained a lot of early traction. On its fiscal Q3 earnings call in early December, it said it had closed 200 Agentforce deals, while a few weeks later in a mid-December update, it said it has closed more than 1,000 Agentforce deals.
Agentforce is a consumption-based product that costs $2 per interaction, so the more it's used, the more revenue it generates for Salesforce. The company sees the opportunity for deploying 1 billion AI agents in fiscal 2026, highlighting the huge potential opportunity in front of the company in the years ahead.
An innovation leader, Salesforce is a solid stock to buy and hold for the long term.
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Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Geoffrey Seiler has positions in Alphabet and Salesforce. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Adobe, Alphabet, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Salesforce. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom and Lowe's Companies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
