Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the buzziest terms in technology at the moment. Given how complex AI is, it is hard to separate the pretenders from the real innovators. The industry is expected to grow at 20% annually through 2029 and hit over $1 trillion in annual spending worldwide. Companies that are the leaders in AI and machine learning can capture a lot of this spending, helping their businesses grow and leading their stocks to put up great returns for shareholders. Here are two AI stocks that look ready to make a bull run over the next decade.

Some of the world's biggest companies are going all-in on the metaverse. One you may not know about is Ansys, a US public company that makes engineering simulation software and has been around since 1970. Dr. Prith Banerjee is its Chief Technology Officer, and I spoke to him last week about his vision for the metaverse -- and specifically, why he thinks the metaverse can't reach its full potential without "optimum physics-based modeling and simulation." Ansys, it turns out, already has a number of partnerships with companies building the metaverse -- including global telecoms companies, microchip and GPU manufacturers, data center and storage companies, and "all the cloud providers," according to Banerjee. He said that Ansys provides a mix of hardware and software expertise to these customers; everything from building hardware to designing a structural electromagnetics system.

We often hear about autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars, but you would be surprised how close the aviation industry is to complete this transition. The thing is that aviation has an emerging need for a solution because tourism is booming, more people than ever are traveling around the world, yet there's the scarcity of pilots. In 2017, there were 609 thousand certified pilots, which seems a lot, but the number drastically declined from 827 thousand in 1980. And the number of qualified pilots is gradually decreasing. One way to tackle the problem is to accelerate an autonomous aircraft development. Even though the idea might sound intimidating at best, it's not that far from happening.

ANSYS (NASDAQ: ANSS) is collaborating with Edge Case Research to engineer the next generation of autonomous vehicles (AV) with unmatched state-of-the-art hazard detection capabilities. Through a new OEM agreement, Edge Case Research integrates its powerful AV artificial intelligence (AI) perception stress testing and risk analysis system, Hologram, within ANSYS' comprehensive AV simulation solution -- delivering a solution to maximize the safety of AVs. Today's AVs rely on AI perception algorithms that are trained to make safety-critical driving decisions. Though highly advanced, an AV may fail to detect hazardous driving scenarios known as "edge cases" -- because its algorithmic training has not prepared it for the many unusual road situations it will encounter in the real world. To ensure the highest safety of an AV -- and make fully autonomous vehicles a reality, developers need tools to automatically identify these challenging edge cases in a way that is far more scalable than manual data labeling.

NEW YORK: Software tool makers New Relic and Ansys, along with contract electronics maker Flex, are set to be "arms merchants" benefiting from new trends in product development, Barron's said on Sunday. Years from now, artificial intelligence techniques will help invent software products, which will be a boon to tech vendors such as New Relic, Ansys and Flex, according to Barron's. Barron's said the companies would capture the rising demand for artificial intelligence in several ways: Flex is moving beyond assembling products and instead helping clients think through initial design; Ansys is making its wares more affordable; and New Relic is moving beyond its current business of supplying products that monitor and manage the health of programs running websites. The next wave is smart software that tests and refines products before humans get involved, allowing products to get to market faster, Barron's said.

ANSYS has released its SeaScape architecture for product developers. SeaScape is claimed to allow organisations to innovate faster than the ever by bringing together the advanced computer science of elastic computing, big data and machine learning and the physics-based world of engineering simulation. Engineering simulation generates huge amounts of data - more than most organisations can effectively leverage for future product designs. At the same time, engineering supercomputing resources are not keeping pace with the demand for higher fidelity simulations needed for increasingly complex products. By leveraging such big data technologies as elastic compute and map reduce, SeaScape is said to provide an infrastructure to address these issues in the context of almost any engineering design objective.