AI Automation Stocks to Watch: Are Workers and Investors Ready for What's Coming?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Invest Talk from KPP Financial, helping investors make sense of the markets one day at a time. Here's your host, Justin Klein.

**Justin Klein** (0:16)
Good afternoon, fellow investors, and welcome back to Invest Talk. This is our Monday, June 15th, 2026 edition, and what a start to the week it was. We have what looks to be finally after a lot of fall starts on a resolution in Iran. It's still somewhat up in the air, but at least more details are in place for now. We'll see if that holds, but ultimately the market reacted to it and moved higher. We'll see how, once again, this evolves throughout the week. Is there a follow-through to the upside or not? We know that this all happens with a backdrop of a new Fed chair, AI, market disruption, new IPOs that are coming out with SpaceX last week and more and more coming in the coming months as well. A lot of moving parts in this market, so always something to discuss.
And our job is to help unpack it for you, separate the signal from the noise. There's a lot of noise out there in the age of social media, age of AI.
You definitely have to be careful what you focus on, because it's easy to get distracted and our job is to refocus you on the right thing. So that's what this hour is about. And I will do that by bringing you topics that are important, that I think are important to you, to me, when we're managing client assets, et cetera. But most importantly will be your live calls. As always, it's 8 at 8.99 chart.
So whatever's on your mind, we would love to hear from you. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now, here's heads up. Our next wealth webinar is set for Tuesday, June 30th from 12 to 1 p.m. Pacific time. So just about two weeks away, the title is Beyond the Yield, How to Invest for Your Income Needs. In just a bit, we'll talk about the market performance and run down the show topics. But first, let's tackle this caller question now.

**Jordan** (2:33)
Hey, guys, this is Jordan from Minnesota. I'm just calling to get your thoughts on Amazon.
I'm just wondering if this is something that I can put some money into and hold it for 20 plus years and we'll do pretty well on. Thanks.

**Justin Klein** (2:47)
This is a great question. For years, it was about blue chip stocks. Technology didn't change much up until the 90s.
Then things moved rapidly from there. Once the Internet hit the world. So just go look back at the big names in the early 90s, shall we say?
They weren't the big names a decade on because then it was the tech names, the Microsofts, eventually the Apples of the world, Amazon, which you're calling about, et cetera. But over time, those big technology names have had wild volatility from the likes of BlackBerry, remember BlackBerry being the king of smartphones, and then suddenly it wasn't. Apple took a shine and rose to prominence.
You had names like Meta that moved into the metaverse and fell out of bed, think fell 70% from its high, something like that, and then rebounded.
But what this shows you is that no tech name, in my mind, is a whole over 20 year type of investment. Because the industry changes so rapidly, especially in this new era of AI.
Think about your shopping experience. It's really easy. I use Amazon. I want to buy something. Certainly my go to for more everyday things. But as agentic AI takes over, you very well could have your own agent that goes out there and doesn't just go to Amazon.
It goes all around the internet and finds the best price, the best product with the best ratings, the best price that will get to you in time for whatever your time frame is.
Meaning, maybe you talk to Siri. Probably a better version of Siri, but could be Siri on your iPhone. Or maybe the Google version or whatever. And it will, once again, do all the work for you.
You just tell it its parameters. I want to make sure it has this rating. I want to make sure it's under this price. I want to make sure it has these features. I want to make sure it gets to me by this date. An agent will go do all of it, check out and buy it. You won't have to do anything. So it will be even easier than Amazon today. I think that is eventually the future now, is that next year, five years, 10 years down the line, we'll see. But clearly there are risks to an Amazon business model. Now maybe they successfully transition, and even that happens, but they move even more into AWS and they're more competitive in that space and supporting the AI stack. That certainly could be a path forward. So there's a lot of ways that this can go right, but certainly many ways it can go wrong. So that's why I don't say Amazon is a buy hold for 20 plus years, put it in the drawer and forget about it, because it's in an industry that is very easy, not to say easy to disrupt, but often is disruptive. So I don't love it at these prices. I definitely think there's more room for multiple compression within the space, and therefore I wouldn't be quick to be picking up Amazon at these prices. Thanks for the call. Now, we had a great show on Friday. We looked into the story, The Wealth Effect Paradox, Why Rich Consumers Are Spending Big While Markets Wobble. We also answered a question on CSX Corp. It was submitted via our YouTube channel. If you happen to miss it, go check it out. The best way to get every show is to follow Invest Talk wherever you get your podcasts. We have a lot of ground to cover today. The next 45 minutes or so, time permitted, we'll get to all of it. Our main focus point concerns the story. Robotic stock, that's what we're talking about. Whether or not the AI will allow another level of automation to be implemented within different industry stacks. We're going to talk about that. We also have other topics on the docket. One is China. China's gate prices are rising on their fastest rate in nearly four years. Why is that and how is that going to feed into inflation around the world, especially here as we still import a lot from China? Then I also want to get to, as we enter, as we have Elon Musk being the first trillionaire, at least worth one trillion.