Citi analyst names Airbnb, Alphabet and Amazon as AI growth picks

Citi U. S. internet analyst Ron Josey named Airbnb, Alphabet and Amazon as preferred technology shares after a rebound from a tech sell-off, speaking in a BNN Bloomberg interview on Nov. 11, 2026. He pointed to stronger e-commerce, online advertising and accelerating cloud revenue at Google Cloud and AWS as support for renewed buying. For households with savings or tech-linked jobs, the calls show where large platforms expect AI spending to turn into revenue.

Airbnb agent, Google Cloud and AWS acceleration

Josey said travel is among the first areas being changed by generative AI tools for research and booking. He said Airbnb has differentiated inventory and direct traffic, with over two-thirds of users going directly to its app and 90 per cent to its site. The company plans to revamp search and launch an agent that can book not only the stay but services around it, such as travel to the home, ordering groceries and renting skis. He said the effort is part of rebuilding around AI, with the opportunity becoming more real in 2027 and potential for room nights to keep growing.

On Alphabet, Josey said the cloud business is operating extremely well, with growth reaccelerating from the core Google Cloud platform and from selling TPUs externally, which he said could support profitability. The debate is search, where growth decelerated to 12 per cent as Google shifted from 10 blue links to AI Overviews and AI Mode. He said Google has multiple properties with over two billion monthly active users and more than 15 properties with over 500 million monthly active users, while query growth reached a five-year high. On Amazon, his top pick, he cited high single-digit growth in U. S. retail, accelerating AWS growth, improving profitability and a North America retail business gaining share.

What cloud demand means for savings and work

For savers and workers, the argument links everyday activity to cloud capacity. Stronger advertising and e-commerce sales in the U. S. feed the retail and ads businesses of Alphabet and Amazon, while demand for AI computing feeds Google Cloud and AWS. Josey said Amazon is among the best positioned on capacity and that its AWS growth rate is expected to be over 40 per cent for the next two years, for 2027 and 2028. He described Google as vertically integrated through its TPU chips, GCP distribution and data, its own data centres and models in the Gemini family, including Argon and Carbon. Added capacity, he said, should be monetized pretty immediately, which would support further cloud growth and related hiring.

This is one analyst view from Citi, not a market consensus or proof of future returns. Josey said search monetization still needs to catch up with query growth and that stabilization may take about a year. Airbnb has announced an AI travel agent but no firm launch date was given in the discussion, and the 2027 timeline was framed as expectation. The comments on CoreWeave competition were limited, with coverage handled by another Citi colleague, and the case for Meta was mentioned only briefly without detail.