Digging Into Comments from IBM and JPMorgan Chase

We are putting together our thoughts about Bank of America’s (BAC) quarterly results and forward-looking comments, something that includes weaving in the context afforded us by remarks from JPMorgan (JPM) and Goldman Sachs (GS) following their Q2 2026 results out earlier today. With BAC shares up following the company’s earnings call, we have some time to properly collect our observations, and may opt to wait until after Morgan Stanley (MS) delivers its results and updated outlook Wednesday morning.

That rumination time allows us to spend some time digging into IBM’s (IBM) negative earnings pre-announcement and tie it back to comments made by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon today about AI. What we found will help explain why shares of Palantir (PLTR) are rising today when IBM shares are declining, as are those for ServiceNow (NOW), Salesforce (CRM), and some others in the software space.

Let’s Begin… With IBM

In IBM’s earnings pre-announcement press release, it said the following:

“In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases. This dynamic impacted client buying patterns.

While we anticipated some supply chain related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization. In addition, clients were distracted with rapidly-evolving, industry-wide cybersecurity concerns in the quarter.“

That first part explains why shares of Dell (DELL) are moving higher, and it also underscores the current supply-demand dynamics in the memory market. But it also calls out the shift in corporate spending from software to data-center infrastructure, adding to concerns about software spending. In IBM’s own words:

“While we anticipated some supply-chain related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization…”

IBM also noted that businesses were prioritizing cybersecurity spending given recent breakthroughs in AI hacking abilities, and that adds more support for our decision to lift our price target for the First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR).

JPMorgan on AI Adoption Inside the Company

During JPMorgan’s earnings call, the company was asked essentially about its AI adoption and Jamie Dimon’s thoughts on that in the banking sector. Here’s what he said:

“We are going to use AI to do a better job for clients. That’s our job. We fully expect it’ll have huge efficiency in certain parts of the company. And we analyze it all the time. I think we’ve mentioned in the past we spend quite a bit of money on it… The whole company’s working this at this point. And I think there are almost 1,000 use cases today, though I would say that really important ones are 50, like 50 across risk fraud, marketing, hedging, prospecting, note-taking, idea generation, document reading, and it’s kind of just starting.

I think you have to put in the back of your mind that there are areas where we may just accelerate what we do that we want to get done anyway. Think of certain applications and customer-facing things and stuff like that. We are preparing to make sure we can retrain our people, and we have had discrete areas where we did reduce jobs by 30% or 40% and most of those people were offered jobs elsewhere.“

Putting the IBM and JPMorgan Comments Together

Parsing IBM’s and JPMorgan’s comments and doing some reading in between the lines, we find confirmation that AI adoption and usage are rising and companies are prioritizing it to drive efficiencies and productivity. That bodes well for Palantir’s commercial business and adds to our thinking that the hyperscalers could lift their capital spending plans when they report their Q2 2026 results.

It also means we should be prepared for more comments about near-term capacity shortages being a headwind on converting bookings, backlog, and RPOs to revenue. We’ll continue to play the long game, especially when it comes to our positions in Arista Networks (ANET), Marvell (MRVL), Broadcom (AVGO) and Nvidia (NVDA).

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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro was long ANET, AVGO, BAC, MRVL, MS, NVDA, and PLTR.