Artificial intelligence is one of the hottest tech trends right now, and most investors who have considered riding the AI wave have probably gotten their fill of suggestions to buy Alphabet, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and a host of other major tech players. There's no doubt these companies will benefit from AI, but they won't be the only ones. If you're looking for a few companies that are using AI to boost their businesses -- but are off the well-worn AI path -- you may want to consider what Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK), Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX), and Zillow (NASDAQ:Z)(NASDAQ:ZG) are doing with AI. Splunk is a hybrid cloud-computing platform company that helps businesses collect and categorize their data so they can better understand how to use it. Think of it this way: Companies are generating so much data from their customers that they're having a hard time making sense of it all.

IBM has been making a lot of noise in the datacenter recently. In December of 2017, the company's POWER9 platforms hit the market with a focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI). In March of this year, Rackspace and Google gave the first public peek at the Zaius and Barreleye 2 Open Compute platform at the Open Compute Summit. At last week's Red Hat summit, IBM and Red Hat announced a partnership to extend IBM Cloud to Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform and Certified Containers. These are all significant, but perhaps the biggest bang of all was the recent announcement that IBM and Nutanix have delivered hyperconverged platforms based on IBM's POWER9 platform.

IBM has been making a lot of noise in the datacenter recently. In December of 2017, the company's POWER9 platforms hit the market with a focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI). In March of this year, Rackspace and Google gave the first public peak at the Zaius and Barreleye 2 Open Compute platform at the Open Compute Summit. At last week's Red Hat summit, IBM and Red Hat announced a partnership to extend IBM Cloud to Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform and Certified Containers. These are all significant, but perhaps the biggest bang of all was the recent announcement that IBM and Nutanix are partnering to deliver hyperconverged platforms based on IBM's POWER9 platform.

Nutanix made another strategic partnership; this one with IBM that will see Big Blue deliver Enterprise Cloud Platform on its line of Power server products. The strategy behind this partnership is for IBM and Nutanix to provide channel partners with a turnkey hyper-converged solution for large enterprise customers who are interested in private clouds. For IBM, they are looking to Nutanix for managing workloads such as big data, but also other intensive workloads such as machine learning, DevOps, and artificial intelligence (AI). IBM said they were looking for an alliance vendor partner with solutions that could scale. According to IBM, reliable storage, fast networks, and scalability combined are not featured on too many data centres in the market today.