Seemingly every company is obsessed with artificial intelligence these days, whether it’s how the technology is transforming their industry or the effects it’s having on employees and customers.

But the degree to which companies are utilizing AI tools internally and adapting to a rapidly changing reality varies dramatically. A new study from AI-Driven Enterprise Institute (AIDE) breaks down how well S&P 500 companies — and their leaders — are adopting AI compared to their peers.

The top performers, unsurprisingly, are centered in the tech industry, according to the data, which was shared with CNBC. In looking at four areas — literacy, advocacy, orientation and implementation — AIDE gave each company a score of up to 100 in the four categories and then provided an overall index score.

In technology, the highest company score (the average of the orientation and implementation pillars) and the only 100, went to chipmaker Nvidia, which has become the world’s largest company by selling the chips and systems that have powered the development of AI models and services. Meta and Amazon also scored 100, but in the S&P 500, those companies are considered communication services and consumer discretionary names, respectively.

The only other 100 company score went to energy producer SLB, formerly Schlumberger. The next highest scorer was retailer Walmart, followed by AES and NextEra Energy, which are both classified as utilities.

The new open-source index draws from publicly available data like earnings call transcripts, job openings and patent applications to measure how much executives know and say about AI, as well as how much their companies are prioritizing the technology and bringing it into daily operations.

The data doesn’t measure whether AI is driving financial returns, but it’s meant to give leaders an objective way to compare their strategy to their peers without relying on self-reported surveys, said Paul Cheek, AIDE’s CEO and a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“When a board asks a CEO — ‘How are we doing compared to our peer group?’ — I don’t want it to be speculative,” Cheek said in an interview. “I want there to be some data that they can use to back up what they have to share.”

Cheek said there’s “significant room for improvement” for board members and executives to increase their own AI literacy, adding that boards need to better understand AI “as it relates to the ability to manage risk and strategic investments in the organizations that create value for all of us.”

Here are the the 20 companies with the top overall scores, based on their “orientation” and “implementation” scores:

1. Nvidia (100)
2. Schlumberger (100)
3. Amazon (100)
4. Meta (100)
5. Walmart (95.84)
6. AES (95.46)
7. NextEra Energy (95.44)
8. Ecolab (95)
9. Digital Realty (94.74)
10. Chevron (94.74)
11. Alphabet (94.72)
12. Equinix (94.59)
13. IQVIA (93.75)
14. Dow (93.34)
15. Halliburton (92.83)
16. Broadridge Financial Solutions (91.66)
17. Microsoft (91.37)
18. Block (90.91)
19. Duke Energy (90.91)
20. PepsiCo (90.62)

These companies were at the top of their sector based on the “AIDE Index”:

WATCH: Meta reshapes workforce as AI disrupts entry level hiring

Meta is once again trying to prove it can make money by doing something other than selling ads. It’s not a strategy that’s worked in the past, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting artificial intelligence will bring better results.

The company said this week that it will begin testing two subscription services for its ChatGPT-like Meta AI app and website. Those paid offerings, available first in Singapore, Guatemala and Bolivia, coincide with the official release of premium subscription plans for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and higher-tier versions of its verification subscription service, which is designed to help businesses protect their brand.

Also this week, Zuckerberg said at Meta’s annual shareholder meeting that a potential cloud computing business is “definitely on the table,” a move that could eventually pit the company against Amazon, Microsoft and Google in cloud infrastructure.

Since Zuckerberg’s company, previously known as Facebook, began selling digital ads almost two decades ago, advertising has been its only real business. In its earnings report last month, Meta said that nearly 98% of its $56.3 billion in first-quarter revenue came from advertising. It’s a remarkably lucrative market, with some of the highest profit margins in the tech industry, and one Meta has long dominated in the U.S., alongside Google.

Meta just recorded its fastest growth rate for any quarter since 2021, showing that the online ad market is currently as robust as ever. But the rapid emergence of AI has raised questions about what happens if and when users turn to new interfaces for information and are no longer spending so much time on screens where they’re exposed to a constant barrage of links.

And when Meta has asked consumers and companies to open their wallets for anything other than ads, the answer has generally been no.

The 2018 debut of the Portal video-calling device was ultimately a bust and was taken off the market four years later. Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of virtual reality hardware startup Oculus in 2014 has yet to produce a breakout VR headset, resulting in the company’s Reality Labs unit racking up over $80 billion in operating losses since late 2020.

Reality Labs has shifted resources from VR to the more promising AI-powered smart glasses. The company is trying to capitalize on the surprise success of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, a notable exception for Meta in hardware.

Then there’s crypto. Zuckerberg jumped into the space in 2019 with a proposed cryptocurrency initiative called Libra. The effort faced intense regulatory scrutiny, resulting in the last remnant of the crypto project shuttering in 2022.

Trying to sell social media services to businesses has also been a struggle. In 2016, Facebook debuted its business-focused Workplace chat product, only to announce in 2024 that it would eventually close the service.

Chhabra noted that past efforts by companies like Verizon and CenturyLink to create cloud businesses out of their vast data center resources didn’t pan out.

“Historical evidences like telcos jumping in the cloud business hoping their capacity and network can bring business was proven wrong across geos and times,” Chhabra said.

WATCH: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp subscriptions, with AI plans coming.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company could enter the cloud computing market if it overspends on data centers and ends up with excess capacity.

“It’s definitely on the table,” Zuckerberg said on Wednesday at Meta’s annual shareholder meeting, in response to a question about potentially competing with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing.

Zuckerberg reiterated comments made on an earnings call last year, noting that “almost every week there are different companies that come to us from outside asking us to both stand up an API service or asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we’ve bought it at.”

Of the four giant hyperscalers in the U.S. Meta is the only one that doesn’t have a cloud infrastructure and services business. Meanwhile, Meta’s spending to fuel artificial intelligence development is right up there with its rivals.

In April, Meta raised its 2026 guidance for AI-related capital expenditures to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from a prior range of $115 billion to $135 billion. Meta shares sank 7% despite better-than-expected first-quarter earnings, underscoring concern about the company’s hefty AI spending.

Zuckerberg is reminding Wall Street that it has the ability to rent out some of its computing resources.

“We haven’t done that yet because we think that we have a use for the compute,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday. “Obviously if we get to a point where we feel that we have overbuilt, then that is an option that we have, and that is partially what gives us confidence in investing in building this out.”

Zuckerberg also discussed the company’s plans involving AI-powered personal assistants, an effort he briefly detailed in an April earnings call after the debut of Meta’s Muse Spark AI model.

“People will be more important in the future, not less, and as people inevitably want to get more out of these agents, there will be an opportunity to charge for premium or high compute versions,” Zuckerberg said.

Although Meta offers businesses some AI-related features on WhatsApp, those services are currently free. Zuckerberg said the company is working at “establishing a longer-term monetization model as well.”

Separately on Wednesday, Meta revealed that it will begin testing monthly subscription services for its Meta AI app and website, marking the first time the company will charge users for AI features. The Meta AI subscription plans will cost either $7.99 or $19.99 a month, depending on certain features, and will initially be available in Singapore, Guatemala and Bolivia.

Zuckerberg said at last year’s shareholder meeting that as Meta AI improves, the company could offer “a subscription service so that people can pay to use more compute.”

WATCH: Meta reshapes workforce as AI disrupts entry level hiring.

Reddit shares fell about 6% on Friday on concern that a new app from Meta called Forum could create an alternative avenue for internet users to congregate and create discussion groups.

Forum, launched as a test app on Apple’s iOS, is part of Facebook Groups. Analysts at Truist wrote in a note on Friday that it’s “an attempt by the company to compete against Reddit as an online forum for public discourse” and “represents a new threat.”

Reddit’s stock is now down almost 40% this year despite a strengthening online ad business. In April, the company reported its seventh-straight quarter of sales growth topping 60%. Meta, meanwhile, reported revenue growth of 33% in the latest quarter.

“The risk from this move, if successful, is a gradual erosion of Reddit’s utility for casual users who have less community loyalty to Reddit and simply want answers,” wrote the Truist analysts, who recommend buying the stock. “This would affect non-core Reddit users more than directly logged-in, habitual users.”

Reddit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta, or Facebook as it was then known, created a separate Facebook Groups app over a decade ago but ended it in 2017. The service still exists as part of Facebook and, like Reddit, hosts discussion groups on all sorts of topics.

WATCH: Meta’s struggle to win over AI enterprise customers.

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees about his plan in late 2022 to lay off 11,000 employees, in cuts that would later expand to 21,000, he was contrite in admitting that he overhired during the Covid pandemic.

“I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that,” Zuckerberg said in a message to staffers in November of that year as the company’s stock was in free fall. In early 2023, Zuckerberg said the cuts were necessary as part of Meta’s “year of efficiency.”

More than three years later, with the latest round of mass layoffs set to begin this week, the tone at the top has changed dramatically. Starting Wednesday, Meta is reducing its workforce by about 10%, or around 8,000 jobs. The company also scrapped plans to fill 6,000 open roles, according to a memo about the layoffs in April.

The current downsizing follows cuts of about 1,000 staffers in January in the company’s Reality Labs unit, and reductions in March impacting hundreds more workers, along with the decision to shift away from third-party vendors and contractors tasked with content moderation tasks.

Meanwhile, Meta is ramping up its investments in artificial intelligence, lifting its 2026 guidance for capital expenditures last month by as much as $10 billion, reaching as high as $145 billion.

In announcing the coming job cuts, a week before disclosing the capex increase, Meta told employees that the reductions are “all part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.”

There was no apology from Zuckerberg. Meta declined to comment for this story.

Internally, there’s an emerging sense of dread across wide swaths of the company, according to current and former Meta employees who asked not to be named in order to speak freely on the matter. That’s in part because more cuts are expected this year, including a potential round of layoffs in August, followed by another round later in the year, some of the sources said.

Finance chief Susan Li said during the first-quarter earnings call that executives “don’t really know what the optimal size of the company will be in the future.” Regarding AI investments, Li said, “our experience so far has been that we have continued to underestimate our compute needs even as we have been ramping capacity significantly as the advances in AI have continued and our teams continue to identify compelling new projects and initiatives.”

Across the tech industry, workers are watching as stock prices balloon and AI startups soar to monster valuations while employers are simultaneously cutting head count due to the rapidly emerging power of AI. So far in 2026, there have been almost 110,000 layoffs at 137 tech companies, according to Layoffs.fyi, after roughly 125,000 cuts all last year.

At the current pace, cuts could approach the peak in 2023, when there were more than 260,000 layoffs, as many software and digital media companies rightsized following the Covid hiring boom.

“The companies that will win in the AI era will be those with focus, urgency, and the discipline to continuously shift investment toward the areas where demand and long-term value creation are strongest,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins wrote in a blog post, titled “Our path forward.”

Cisco shares popped more than 13% on Thursday, their best day since 2011, after the company reported better-than-expected results and lifted its AI infrastructure guidance.

Wall Street still isn’t sold on Meta’s story, but that’s mostly because the company’s AI strategy has been scattered and remains largely in flux. The stock is down about 7% so far this year and almost 5% over the past 12 months, underperforming all of its megacap peers other than Microsoft.

Whatever anxiety investors are experiencing, the feelings inside the company are more intense, with some longtime staffers questioning Meta’s AI pursuits under AI chief Alexandr Wang, while also weighing if now is the time to leave for opportunities at other companies in the AI race, according to current and former employees.

Data aggregated by Blind, an anonymous professional network that requires users to verify their employment with a work email address, reveals some of the internal malaise.

Meta’s overall rating by employees on Blind has declined 25% from a peak in the second quarter of 2024 to the current period, with a 39% drop in its culture rating. In every category other than compensation, Meta has seen a ratings decline and dramatically underperforms rivals Amazon, Google and Netflix, the Blind data reveals.

The company’s full-court press with AI included the recent debut of an employee tracking tool intended to collect data from staffers’ actions, such as mouse movements and keystrokes on their work computers. The Model Capability Initiative, or MCI, as it’s called, is part of Meta’s efforts to train AI models to power digital agents that can perform various coding and white-collar tasks.

Employees have characterized the data tracking tool as “dystopian,” according to messages viewed by CNBC, with some workers expressing fear that personal information could be leaked. Some Meta workers have noted that their workplace computers appear slower since the company initiated the project, adding to their frustration, sources said.

Meta workers responded by creating an online petition that urges Zuckerberg and leadership to shutter the project.

“Collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace,” the petition says. “It should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of AI training.”

Leo Boussioux, an assistant professor of information systems at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, described Meta as one of many companies currently overhauling its workforce and operations to accommodate “the fact that AI is changing the way we work.”

Boussioux said one goal could be to increase fear or pressure, using AI-related threats and layoffs as a “form of weapon to enable a culture change.” But, he said, it could also reflect “poor management that does not know how to enable this in a more comfortable way for the employees.”

— CNBC’s Stephen Desaulniers and Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

WATCH: Meta’s overall numbers were impressive, says Jim Cramer.

The more than 20,000 potential job cuts Meta and Microsoft revealed on Thursday, months after Amazon announced its most widespread layoffs ever, may only be the beginning.

The same companies that are collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure to meet soaring demand for AI services are seeking efficiencies from AI by slashing head count. They’re also still trying to rightsize from the pandemic-fueled overhiring.

Many economists and industry experts are fearful that a labor crisis may be upon us today — not coming sometime in the future — given how quickly AI is sweeping across corporate America. As of this week, over 92,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2026, according to Layoffs.fyi, bringing the total to almost 900,000 since 2020

“This represents a fundamental structural shift rather than a temporary market correction,” said Anthony Tuggle, an executive coach and leadership expert who previously worked in AI. “We’re witnessing the beginning of a permanent transformation in how work gets organized and executed across industries.”

Job anxiety has been on the rise since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, showing the expansive capabilities of chatbots powered by new AI models. Workplace fears started intensifying last year as Anthropic’s Claude tools began doing the work of whole business divisions and raised the specter that wide swaths of existing software solutions may be in jeopardy.

Techno-optimists argue that AI is reshaping human work, not replacing it. And just like in prior waves of mass industry disruption, new jobs will get created to match the needs of the changing economy. Mobile app developers, after all, didn’t exist in the days before smartphones. And what use were IT administrators before we created servers?

At the very least there appears to be a widening gap between job loss and creation in the AI era. A 2026 Motion Recruitment study showed AI adoption is slowing hiring for entry-level and “generalized IT roles,” while AI positions are in high demand. Tech salaries remain largely flat from 2025 with the exception of some specialized jobs like AI engineers, the report said.

Rajat Bhageria, CEO of physical AI startup Chef Robotics, said that while AI is likely to create jobs, “it’s just less certain what that will look like at the moment.”

“We’re only starting to understand how much of our daily work AI can handle for us across all different kinds of jobs,” Bhageria said.

Meta only hinted at AI in its announcement on Thursday. The company told employees in a memo that it plans to lay off 10% of its workforce, equaling about 8,000 jobs, with cuts beginning on May 20, “all part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we’re making.” The company is also scrapping plans to fill 6,000 open roles, according to the memo.

Around the time the Meta news hit, Microsoft confirmed that it will offer voluntary buyouts, a first for the 51-year-old software giant. About 7% of U.S. employees are eligible, according to a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named because the number isn’t being made public. With about 125,000 U.S. employees, that could add up to 8,750 cuts.

Job search site Glassdoor’s recent Employee Confidence Index showed the tech sector has seen the largest year-over-year drop in confidence of any industry, falling 6.8 percentage points in March from a year earlier to 47.2%.

Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s chief economist, said fewer people are quitting their jobs, fearing an unstable market, a dynamic that comes at a cost to employee morale and career satisfaction. It also means even more job cuts.

“Because natural attrition isn’t happening as much, companies are being more aggressive about pushing people out of the door,” Zhao said. “Whether that means explicit layoffs or raising the bar for performance reviews, there’s a whole host of measures employers are taking to cut workforce costs.”

Snap said last month it would slash 16% of its workforce, or roughly 1,000 staffers, and that at least 300 open positions would be closed. CEO Evan Spiegel cited AI-driven efficiencies in a letter to staff. Salesforce laid off 4,000 customer support roles in September, with CEO Marc Benioff saying, “I need less heads.”

Oracle said in March that it was laying off thousands of employees as it ramps up AI spending. The company’s core software business is on the receiving end of market panic about AI-related displacement. Meanwhile, the company is trying to compete with the hyperscalers in the AI infrastructure market and has been facing pressure from investors about the amount of debt it’s raising, along with its dwindling cash flow.

Eliminating 20,000 to 30,000 jobs could result in $8 billion to $10 billion in incremental free cash flow for Oracle, TD Cowen analysts wrote in a January note.

Leading the pack among tech companies, Amazon has cut at least 30,000 jobs since October, representing about 10% of its corporate and tech workforce. Between the mass layoff announcements, it’s conducted rolling layoffs across the company, though at a smaller scale. Google has also carried out small but regular cuts since 2023.

But the spending continues.

Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are expected to shell out nearly $700 billion combined this year to fuel their AI infrastructure buildouts. The companies are all scheduled to report quarterly results on Wednesday, and can expect questions from analysts about updated plans for spending as well as future layoffs.

Meta and Broadcom on Tuesday announced a sweeping deal that extends an existing partnership between the two companies for the design of Meta’s custom in-house AI accelerators through 2029.

At the same time, Meta said Broadcom’s CEO, Hock Tan, told Meta last week that he has decided not to stand for reelection to Meta’s board, according to a filing. Tan joined Meta’s board in 2024.

Meta has committed to an initial deployment of 1 gigawatt of its Training and Inference Accelerators according to a statement. The deal will eventually see Meta deploying multiple gigawatts of chips based on Broadcom technology.

The MTIA chips will be the first AI silicon to use a 2 nanometer process, Broadcom said in its own statement.

“Meta is partnering with Broadcom across chip design, packaging, and networking to build out the massive computing foundation we need to deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people,” Meta’s co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, was quoted as saying in the statement.

Broadcom shares rose 3% in extended trading after the announcement. Meta stock was flat.

“Now, contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator, MTIA roadmap is alive and well. We’re shipping now and, in fact, for the next generation XPUs, we will scale to multiple gigawatts in 2027 and beyond,” Tan said on Broadcom’s March earnings call.

Meta unveiled four new versions of its in-house MTIA chips in March. It first unveiled the custom silicon in 2023, following on the heels of similar chip programs at Google and Amazon.

Hyperscalers are seeking alternatives to the costly, constrained graphics processing units from Nvidia and AMD, as they hustle to power AI data centers.

They’re making GPU alternatives called application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, that are smaller and cheaper than the general-purpose AI workhorse GPUs, but are limited to performing a narrower set of tasks.

Google was first to the custom ASIC game, releasing its first Tensor Processing Unit in 2015. Amazon was next, with its first custom chip announced in 2018. While these tech giants incorporate their AI chips as part of their respective cloud computing platforms so customers can access them, Meta’s MTIA chips are used entirely for internal purposes.

The deal comes two weeks after Broadcom announced a long-term agreement with Google for producing its TPUs, and said Anthropic would access 3.5 gigawatts worth of the in-house Google chip.

Broadcom shares are up 10% so far in 2026, while the S&P 500 index has gained about 2% over the same period.

Tracey Travis, who last year retired from her position as Estée Lauder’s finance chief, will leave Meta’s board after taking a board seat in 2020, Meta said.

Meta has made a flurry of deals since committing in January to spending up to $135 billion on AI this year as it tries to keep pace with its megacap peers as well as Anthropic and OpenAI.

Meta’s AI deals over the past couple months include commitments to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs, millions of Nvidia chips and new custom chips made by chip architecture firm Arm Holdings.

Meta has plans for 31 data centers, including 27 in the U.S.