Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere, and generative AI has been likely the biggest stock market story since ChatGPT debuted in 2022. Despite fears of a bubble forming, the market seems as bullish as ever on AI going into 2026.
But if you want to hedge your bets on AI, the way to do it is by investing in companies that will profit from it indirectly, but don't have the core of their business tied up in AI.
CrowdStrike (CRWD +4.33%) is a perfect example.
Image source: Getty Images.
The crowd favorite
Put simply, CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company, although there's much more to it than meets the eye. The company's flagship product is Falcon, which makes cybersecurity measures both easier to use and more effective than ever.
Most cybersecurity programs or hardware only focus on one aspect of keeping your network safe, like cloud security, data protection, or threat intelligence. Falcon protects all three of those nodes in a network and several more at once. By putting all those functions in one program, Falcon is both easier to use and more cost-effective than running a dozen smaller programs.
What's more, because Falcon is cloud native, all the Falcon Sensors deployed by CrowdStrike's customers work together. If one node on that network is breached, Falcon can learn how to counter it and protect the rest of the network from the same attack. It's like self-repairing, self-hardening armor.
That also means that the more clients that are part of CrowdStrike's network, the more effective Falcon's capabilities become, because it has more data from more cyberattacks to analyze.
NASDAQ: CRWD
Key Data Points
Most cybersecurity programs are simply a passive shield to protect a customer's network. Falcon, however, actively hunts threats like your immune system hunts a virus. When it finds a breach, CrowdStrike eliminates and learns the threat, making it better able to defend against it in the future, not just for the client whose security was breached, but for the entire network.
It works 24/7/365, which is especially important now because AI has accelerated the pace of cyberattacks significantly. According to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, AI can enable hackers to run cyberattacks all the time, even when the hacker isn't at their computer. It can also allow for more sophisticated phishing attacks and even create deepfake video or audio of a target's employees to get past security measures, both digital and human.
Falcon can run both offense and defense against AI and traditional cyberthreats, and the results for its clients, which include the likes of Ericsson and Salesforce, to name a few, speak for themselves.
It takes Falcon a mean time of just 4 minutes to detect a breach or attack, and it results in a 75% faster mean-time-to-respond (MTTR) to the threat compared to the client's previous cybersecurity measures. In all, CrowdStrike resolves over 13 million detected threats or breaches annually. That will only get faster and more effective the more clients deploy Falcon nodes.
The result for CrowdStrike is that, despite a market cap of $118 billion and annual revenue of nearly $3.8 billion for 2025, it's growing like a start-up.
A growing crowd
Full-year fiscal 2025 (ended Jan. 31, 2025) revenue was up 31% over CrowdStrike's fiscal 2024, and its annual recurring revenue (ARR) for 2025 grew 23% over 2024. And the company's growth streak has continued through its fiscal 2026 up until its latest results for Q3 (reported Dec. 2, 2025.)
Q3 2025 saw CrowdStrike's total revenues climb 22% year over year to $1.2 billion for the quarter. It ended the quarter with ARR of $4.9 billion, up 23% over Q3 2025. Net new ARR grew 73% over Q3 2025 as well, so there are plenty of new customers joining the Falcon network.
It gets even better. CrowdStrike grew its operating income 32% over Q3 2026 to $265 million. Diluted earnings per share (EPS) shot up 26%, and free cash flow grew 28% to $296 million. And the company is currently sitting on a gross profit margin of 81%, an operating margin of 21%, and a free cash flow margin of 24%.
And there's plenty of room for that growth to continue, as CrowdStrike projects its total addressable market (TAM) will more than double from $140 billion in 2026 to $300 billion by the end of the decade.
Plus, with total debt of about $818 million to cash reserves of $4.8 billion, CrowdStrike has more than enough resources to continue its growth streak for some time to come. The company has managed a five-year annualized return of 18% to the S&P 500's 13%, and in the last 12 months, it's up 25% to the S&P 500's 14%. Talk about a crowd-pleaser.
CrowdStrike is worth a look if you want to profit from the changes AI is bringing to cybersecurity -- without directly investing in an AI company.
