Buy 3 High-Flying Mid-Cap Stocks on Solid AI Cloud Computing Momentum

We have narrowed our search to three mid-cap AI cloud computing-centric stocks to benefit from the space’s astonishing global demand. These are: Five9 Inc. FIVN, Fastly Inc. FSLY and Qualys Inc. QLYS. Each of our picks currently carries either a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

The chart below shows the price performance of our three picks year to date.

Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

Five9 Inc.

Zacks Rank #1 Five9 provides intelligent cloud software for contact centers in the United States, India, and internationally. FIVN offers a virtual contact center cloud platform that delivers a suite of applications, enabling a broad range of contact center-related customer service, sales, and marketing functions. 

FIVN’s platform comprises interactive virtual agents, agent assistance, workflow automation, workforce engagement management, AI insights, and AI summaries. It allows the management and optimization of customer interactions across voice, chat, email, web, social media, and mobile channels directly or through its application programming interfaces.

FIVN has been benefiting from the growing adoption of AI tools in its call center services, with personalized AI agents emerging as a major growth driver. Five9 is also strengthening its competitive position through AI Agents, GenAI Studio and partnerships such as its enterprise AI solution with Google Cloud. 

Management believes AI significantly expands its addressable market by extending beyond cloud contact center software into AI-driven labor automation, creating a substantially larger long-term opportunity.

Strong Estimate Revisions

Five9 has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 10.2% and 10.1%, respectively, for the current year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for current-year earnings has remained the same over the last 60 days.

FIVN has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 9.9% and 15.2%, respectively, for the next year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for next-year’s earnings has improved 0.3% over the last seven days.

Fastly Inc.

Zacks Rank #2 Fastly provides infrastructure software offering cloud computing, image optimization, security, edge-computing technology and streaming solutions, expanding into areas such as application security and AI-driven workloads. The company’s Fastly AI Accelerator is a semantic caching solution that allows developers to optimize their LLM generative AI applications.

FSLY is aligning its platform with machine traffic that requires real-time decisions on access, security and monetization. Management said AI-generated traffic is growing roughly 6.5 times faster than human traffic, with related demand appearing most clearly in Security and Compute and also in Network Services.

FSLY’s Edge Cloud Platform offers more efficient performance as developers need only a single line of code instead of repeated calls to the AI provider to update their application to a new API endpoint. 

Strong Estimate Revisions

Fastly has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 18.8% and more than 100%, respectively, for the current year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for current-year earnings has improved 65.6% over the last 30 days.

FSLY has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 11.5% and 17.3%, respectively, for the next year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for next-year’s earnings has improved 59% over the last 30 days.

Qualys Inc.

Zacks Rank #1 Qualys benefits from rising demand for cloud-based cybersecurity, broader adoption of VMDR and Enterprise TruRisk Management and growing interest in automated risk operations. QLYS’ product innovation across AI-driven detection, validation and remediation supports platform expansion, while QFlex and channel execution can deepen customer spending.

The rising frequency and speed of cyber threats support demand for Qualys’ cloud-based security platform. QLYS said AI can compress exploit timelines to hours and, in some cases, enable compromise before a patch exists. This raises the value of continuous detection, validation and remediation rather than periodic scanning and manual handoffs.

QLYS is extending its vulnerability-management franchise into AI-native risk operations through Enterprise TruRisk Management. New capabilities include InstaScan for scanless detection within minutes of vulnerability disclosure, TruConfirm and Agent Val for exploit validation, and Agent Sara for autonomous remediation.

Strong Estimate Revisions

Qualys has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 9.5% each for the current year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for current-year earnings has improved 2.2% over the last 30 days.

QLYS has an expected revenue and earnings growth rate of 8.2% and 9.1%, respectively, for the next year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for next year’s earnings has improved 1.8% over the last 30 days.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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