Andrew Willis: In the recent “10 for 2023” report from Sustainalytics, Martin Vezér and Poulomi Sengupta combed through Pitchbook and Sustainalytics to find you stocks that run businesses better.

You can’t beat automation when it comes to efficiency. Allowing those automated processes to learn and improve on their own, however, is another story. Take what happens when IBM's (IBM) Watson joins the IT department.

Fewer unnecessary alerts, downtime or bugs to bother your business. IBM’s Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps produced a 50% reduction in customer workflow incidents, according to the firm, and an 80% reduction in time spent responding to false positives. This should be useful for IBM itself as it’s involved in 90% of all global credit card transactions, according to equity analyst Julie Bhusal Sharma, which we believe is tied to a virtual monopoly in the mainframe space.

After 107 years, IBM is a trusted partner for enterprises, which helps make up a narrow moat. And Sustainalytics says the company takes its responsibilities seriously. Regular training, external audits and vulnerability assessments are among the efforts that earn the company a low ESG risk rating.

With luck, IBM’s AIOps business will pay off, as there are many competitors in the enterprise software space these days – like next week’s firm that aims to use A.I. to predict IT issues before they even appear.

For Morningstar, I’m Andrew Willis.