By Theo Francis

Nvidia is No. 1 in The Wall Street Journal's inaugural ranking of Best Companies for the Future, topping a list heavy on tech stalwarts as artificial intelligence reshapes business.

The chip maker is joined in the top five by Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Cisco Systems, a group largely propelled by strong scores for innovation, financial strength and AI readiness -- a measure of how prepared a company is for an AI-centric future, as reflected in its operations, its investments and its people.

The ranking seeks to evaluate how well companies in the S&P 500 are doing on measures intended to match up with future success. The companies were scored on 30 metrics from 20 data providers across six areas: AI readiness, innovation more broadly, talent readiness (based on hiring, retention and employee satisfaction), financial fitness, supply-chain resilience and exposure to geopolitical and other risks, and corporate agility, including executive share of total head count and how employees regard their company.

The ranking was compiled by Bendable Labs for the WSJ Leadership Institute. (See more on the ranking's methodology here.)

A third of the top 100 spots in the overall ranking are taken by companies in technology production and services, while 18 of the top 25 are in those industries or are generally regarded as tech companies even if officially classified differently. Those include Alphabet and Meta, which are labeled as media-and-entertainment companies in the Global Industry Classification Standard used in the ranking. Non-tech companies in the top 25 include financial giants Mastercard (No. 7), S&P Global (No. 13) and Visa (No. 15), and drugmakers Johnson & Johnson (No. 20) and Eli Lilly (No. 22).

S&P 500 companies are already among the biggest and most successful companies on the globe, notes Rick Wartzman, who co-founded Bendable Labs and oversaw the ranking. "Companies are all paying attention to AI, they're all thinking about geopolitical risk, they're all thinking about having resilient supply chains and they're all making sure they meet their talent needs for the future," he says. "What's hard to tell is how well they're making progress versus their competitors and peers."

The ranking is intended to make those comparisons easier for managers, investors and others. "It's a diagnostic tool, it's not a predictive tool," Wartzman says. "The data provide some insight into which companies are best-positioned to deal with whatever comes next in a time of rapid change and great uncertainty."

Size matters

The biggest companies stand out. Although Bendable's analysis didn't explicitly consider market value, bigger companies tended to do better. That makes sense, given that the stock market largely values companies by future potential, says Kelly Tang, Bendable's chief data scientist. "If our general drift is in line with what the stock market is saying -- that these are the most valuable companies -- great."

Size isn't everything, of course. Nvidia is joined near the top of the ranking by other big chip makers, like Advanced Micro Devices -- but some also lag behind.

AMD, the second-highest-ranked semiconductor company, after Nvidia, is No. 16 overall, scoring well on agility, innovation and AI readiness. With a market capitalization of around $850 billion, it's among the 20 biggest companies in the ranking (though that's still about one-sixth of Nvidia's valuation). Its data-center business is booming.

Another chip maker, Broadcom, has also capitalized on demand for AI chips and is more than double AMD's size. But it only made No. 110 in the ranking, weighed down by lower scores on AI readiness, talent readiness and resilience that lessened the impact of good scores on innovation and financial fitness. The company's software unit, which makes up 40% of sales, has been growing slowly.

AI's importance

AI, of course, looms large in the future of any business. The technology is pushing the stock market to new highs as demand for memory, graphics and other semiconductors is stoking shortages and soaring valuations for chip makers. And companies across sectors cite cost savings from AI while cutting their workforces, even as economists worry that the technology is distorting the economy and masking sizable effects from tariffs and the war with Iran.

Bendable evaluated AI readiness using third-party scores on seven measures. An MIT analysis of securities filings seeks to gauge how much companies have integrated AI into their operations. Other measures considered AI-related skills and experience listed in employees' LinkedIn profiles, and keywords used in corporate board descriptions and director biographies.

Past performance on at least one of those measures seems to have some predictive value, Bendable found. Companies that scored well on MIT's measure over the five years ending in 2020 -- well before the recent boom in generative AI -- tended to outperform more recently, too, both on MIT's measure and in the overall Best Companies for the Future ranking.

Scores may not tell the full story, of course. Apple ranks No. 12 overall, but it came in well below the other Magnificent Seven tech giants on AI, at No. 56. It ranked worst of the bunch on several components of that score, including AI adoption and AI investment, merger-and-acquisition activity and strategic partnerships.

The iPhone-maker has been seen as trailing as other companies rush to adopt generative AI. But a bigger factor for the Best Companies for the Future ranking may be Apple's tendency to hold its cards close to the vest, Bendable Labs concluded. The MIT measure of AI adoption, for example, depends on company disclosures, and saying little doesn't necessarily mean little is happening.

Apple scored closer to the other companies on some other AI-related measures, and also on separate measures of innovation beyond AI.

Those measures include research-and-development spending, the number and estimated value of new patents, and employment and hiring for cutting-edge positions beyond AI. One area missing from the analysis: innovation in more-efficient procedures, the kind of thing that can make companies more effective in less obvious ways, Wartzman says. "That's really hard to pick up."

About the workforce

When it comes to overall hiring and workplace measures, Bendable Labs took care to incorporate how companies fared with so-called Generation Z employees, or zoomers -- those born between roughly the mid-1990s and the early 2010s.

Now about 30% of the U.S. workforce, they are on track to become the biggest segment in coming years, Wartzman says. One ranking component analyzed LinkedIn profiles to gauge employee retention among those workers, while another considered how open companies are to work-from-home arrangements widely favored by Gen Zers.

Non-tech companies took around half of the top spots in talent readiness, including Delta Air Lines at No. 1. The company ranked No. 103 overall, with particularly low scores for financial fitness and innovation.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 07, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)

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