Salesforce, the world's largest provider of cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) services, uses its AI platform Einstein to analyze trends and provide data-driven predictions. UiPath's robotic process automation (RPA) platform automates repetitive office tasks -- such as managing inventories, processing invoices, onboarding customers, and entering large amounts of data -- to reduce an organization's dependence on human employees. But over the past 12 months, Salesforce's stock declined 14% as UiPath's stock plunged 53%. Let's see why both stocks lost their luster, and if either one is a good turnaround play for 2023 and beyond. Salesforce expects its revenue to rise 17% in fiscal 2023, cooling from its 25% growth in fiscal 2022, as its adjusted EPS rises 3%. Its growth is decelerating as the macro headwinds force many companies to rein in their spending on big software deals.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Palantir (NYSE:PLTR) operate in different sectors, but both tech companies are profiting from the secular expansion of the artificial intelligence (AI) market. Nvidia's GPUs are often associated with video games, but a growing number of data centers are installing its high-end GPUs to process AI tasks. Palantir's data mining platforms accumulate and process data from disparate sources to help government agencies and big companies make AI-driven decisions. Both companies have generated impressive gains over the past 12 months. Nvidia's stock more than doubled as it continued to sell more gaming and data center GPUs. Palantir's stock soared about 160% as it dazzled investors with its robust revenue growth rates and optimistic long-term targets.

Unlike tech pundits who issue bleak warnings about AI, Baidu's founder and CEO Robin Li is a self-described "optimist" in regards to AI technologies. Last October, Li told the South China Morning Post that AI "will not destroy human beings but will give people eternal life," since "everything every person has said and done, even people's memories, emotions and consciousness" can be stored on the cloud. Li claims that accumulating all that data would enable machines to "learn people's way of thinking" and allow generations to communicate "across time and space" to solve problems. Li also doesn't seem concerned about privacy issues. At the China Development Forum in early 2018, Li predicted that most Chinese citizens would be willing to "exchange privacy for safety, convenience, or efficiency."