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The AI trade has been anything but smooth in 2026.After a strong run, investor sentiment has shifted in recent months. Many artificial intelligence stocks have sold off sharply, and investor anxiety has risen alongside them. But not every analyst is running for the exits.Morningstar sees the pullback as a chance to buy well-capitalized AI names at a discount. Two dividend stocks, in particular, are catching their eye: Microsoft and Broadcom.Both carry wide economic moat ratings from Morningstar, indicating durable competitive advantages. Both are profitable, growing, and committed to paying shareholders. And right now, both dividend stocks are sitting at prices that Morningstar believes significantly understate their true worth.Microsoft: A dividend stock built for the AI eraMicrosoft (MSFT) is a Dow 30 stock that pays a quarterly dividend of $0.91 per share, or $3.64 annually, with a current dividend yield of around 0.98%. The tech stock has raised its dividend for 21 consecutive years, making it one of the most reliable income payers in the technology sector.Key dividend metrics for MSFT stock:Dividend yield: About 0.98%Annual dividend per share: $3.64Payout ratio: Approximately 40% of FCFDividend growth (1 year): About 10%Consecutive years of dividend growth: 21Payout frequency: QuarterlyMicrosoft is barely tapping its FCF to fund its dividend, which means there’s plenty of runway for future increases.More on dividend stocks:Energy Transfer stands out as high-yield dividend stockIs Realty Income the best monthly dividend stock to buy nowVerizon remains a top dividend stock for passive incomeMorningstar assigns the stock its highest five-star rating and a $600 fair value estimate, implying the stock is roughly 62% undervalued at current prices. It also holds a “wide moat” designation and a “medium” uncertainty rating, a combination that signals long-term competitive strength with manageable risk.The bull case is straightforward. Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, is already an approximately $75 billion businessgrowing at around 30% annually. Its investment in OpenAI has also positioned it at the center of the AI arms race.At the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference last month, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella made the case for what he called the “network effects of intelligence”: a vision where AI compounds the value of everything Microsoft has already built in its productivity and cloud businesses. “The next office, which is bigger than all of the offices that came before, may be headless,” Nadella said, pointing to AI-powered agents that work on behalf of users without a traditional interface.For dividend stock investors, that’s a meaningful signal. Microsoft’s AI ambitions are not a distraction from its core business; they are the core business.

Microsoft enjoys a wide AI moat.picture alliance/ Getty Images

Broadcom: The custom chip dividend stock Broadcom (AVGO) is a different kind of AI story, but no less compelling.AVGO stock pays an annual dividend of $2.60 per share, with a yield of approximately 0.85%. The company has raised its dividend for 14 consecutive years, with per-share dividend growth averaging nearly 31% over the past decade.Here’s the AVGO stock dividend breakdown:Dividend yield: About 0.85%Annual dividend per share: $2.60Quarterly dividend: $0.65Dividend growth (10-year average): Approximately 30.6%Consecutive years of dividend growth: 14Payout frequency: QuarterlyMorningstar gives AVGO a four-star rating and a $500 fair value estimate, suggesting shares are trading about 61% below fair value. The firm assigns it a wide-moat rating but a “high” uncertainty tag — a nod to the volatility that often comes with the semiconductor space.Related: Morgan Stanley resets Broadcom price target after earningsThe case for this dividend stock rests on its dominance in custom AI accelerators. Broadcom builds application-specific chips, or XPUs, for some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence. Its CEO Hock Tan revealed on the company’s fiscal first-quarter 2026 earnings call that it now counts six customers for these chips, including Google, Anthropic, Meta, and, starting in 2027, OpenAI.The numbers are striking. Broadcom’s AI semiconductor revenue surged 106% year over year in fiscal Q1 2026, reaching $8.4 billion. Management guided for $10.7 billion in AI chip revenue next quarter, a 140% year-over-year jump.Morningstar sees Broadcom as the most important secondary AI compute vendor after Nvidia, benefiting directly from hyperscalers’ push to reduce their dependence on any single supplier. Its networking chip business, which is growing even faster than its custom accelerators, adds another layer of strength. The infrastructure software side, anchored by VMware, provides the steady, recurring cash flow that supports the dividend.The final takeawayThe “anything but AI” mood that has gripped markets in 2026 has left two of the sector’s strongest companies looking attractively priced, according to Morningstar.Microsoft is a low-payout, high-growth dividend stock sitting atop a cloud and AI platform that keeps compounding. Broadcom operates an AI chip business that’s scaling faster than most analysts expected even a few months ago.Neither dividend stock pays a headline-grabbing yield. But for investors who think in years rather than quarters, both offer something harder to find: durable businesses, rising dividends, and AI tailwinds that may be just getting started.Related: Mega-cap dividend stock targets $9 trillion valuation

Investors have become less interested in Tesla’s car business lately, but some analysts see that as shortsighted.

Nvidia transformed itself from a company known first for making the hardware for processing graphics in gaming to accelerating processing models for artificial intelligence. Nvidia continues to focus on growing its artificial intelligence business, and part of that growth requires hiring top talent.In fiscal 2026, the tech giant hired 6,000 additional employees, which required allocating more cash to human capital. Here’s who gets paid the most at Nvidia, the world’s biggest publicly traded company, and what the median compensation among employees is.Who are Nvidia’s highest-paid executives?Nvidia’s highest-paid employees are in its executive ranks. According to Nvidia’s fiscal 2025 data, CEO Jensen Huang had a base salary of $1.5 million, but cash and stock awards boosted his total compensation to $49.86 million. Huang is also Nvidia’s largest individual shareholder, owning around 3.7% of the company.Among executive vice presidents, Ajay Puri, who is in charge of worldwide field operations, had the highest salary — at almost $950,000 — and also the largest compensation, at $21.59 million. Colett Kress, who serves as CFO, had total compensation of $21.36 million, while Debora Shoquist, in charge of operations, had $19.21 million, and Timothy Teter, general counsel, made $19.20 million.Nvidia’s executive vice president salaries & compensationExecutive2025 SalaryTotal CompensationColette M. Kress, EVP and CFO$893,739$21,362,532Ajay K. Puri, EVP, Worldwide Field Operations$943,391$21,590,897Debora Shoquist, EVP, Operations$844,087$19,217,903Timothy S. Teter, EVP, General Counsel and Secretary$844,087$19,201,821What is Nvidia’s median compensation & CEO pay ratio?Nvidia’s median compensation, which includes salary and stock awards, was around $300,000 in fiscal 2025, based on company data. Its CEO pay ratio, which compares the CEO’s compensation to that of the median employee, was 166 to 1, based on Huang’s $49.86 million compensation. By comparison, Apple’s CEO pay ratio was wider, at 533 to 1, partly due to Apple having more employees in fiscal 2025.Still, that pay ratio was significantly higher than just five years earlier. In fiscal 2020, Nvidia’s CEO-to-median-employee pay ratio was 64 to 1. Huang’s compensation was $11.49 million, compared to an employee median of $178,944.Related: How many employees does Nvidia have? From R&D to salesHow much do Nvidia’s engineers make?Engineers make up a significant portion of Nvidia’s workforce and are at the core of its focus on innovation through research and development. Nvidia said that it has invested more than $76 billion in research and development since its inception — paving the way for the creation of its GPUs and hardware for use in AI. Since fiscal 2020 alone, the company spent around $56 billion on R&D.NVIDIA employs around 42,000 people, of which 31,000 are in research and development. 11,000 work in sales, marketing, operations, and administrative positions. That’s up from a payroll of 36,000 just a year before. Nvidia continues to attract top talent. 80% of its workforce is technical, while more than 50% hold advanced degrees. Of the 2,357 jobs posted on Nvidia’s careers page as of late March 2026, 1,600 were in engineering. The base salary for a system software engineer based at the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, ranged from $152,000 to $287,500 based on experience. A senior engineering manager commanded higher pay, from $272,000 to $431,250. Incentives, such as granting stock awards, could further increase their compensation.More on Nvidia:Does Nvidia pay dividends? Payouts & yield amid the AI boomNvidia’s stock split history: Everything you need to knowNvidia’s headquarters: An ode to space and 3D renderingDoes Nvidia promote from within?Nvidia said that for its fiscal 2026, turnover was low, at 3.7%, and it aspired to make the company “a place where people can build their careers over their lifetime.“ Nvidia invests in its employees through offerings such as on-the-job training courses, and “tuition reimbursement programs to subsidize educational programs and advanced certifications and encourage internal job mobility.”

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When Intuit shipped AI agents to 3 million customers, 85% came back. The reason, according to the company’s EVP and GM: combining AI with human expertise turned out to matter more than anyone expected — not less.Marianna Tessel, the financial software company’s EVP and GM, calls this AI-HI combination a “massive ask” from its customers, noting that it provides another level of confidence and trust. “One of the things we learned that has been fascinating is really the combination of human intelligence and artificial intelligence,” Tessel said in a new VB Beyond the Pilot podcast. “Sometimes it’s the combination of AI and HI that gives you better results.”Chatbots alone aren’t the answer Intuit — the parent company of QuickBooks, TurboTax, MailChimp and other widely-used financial products — was one of the first major enterprises to go all in on generative AI with its GenOS platform last June (long before fears of the “SaaSpocalypse” had SaaS companies scrambling to rethink their strategies). Quickly, though, the company recognized that chatbots alone weren’t the answer in enterprise environments, and pivoted to what it now calls Intuit Intelligence. The dashboard-like platform features specialized AI agents for sales, tax, payroll, accounting and project management that users can interact with using natural language to gain insights on their data, automate tasks, and generate reports. Customers report invoices are being paid 90% in full and five days faster, and that manual work has been reduced by 30%. AI agents help close books, categorize transactions, run payroll, automate invoice reminders and surface discrepancies.For instance, one Intuit customer uncovered fraud after interacting with AI agents and asking questions about amounts that didn’t add up. “In the beginning it was like, ‘Is that an error? And as he dug in, he discovered very significant fraud,” Tessel said. Why humans are still in the loopStill, Intuit operates on the principle that humans are “always accessible,” Tessel said. Platforms are built in a way that users can ask questions of a human expert when they’re not getting what they need from the AI agent, or want a human to bounce ideas off of. “I’m not talking about product experts,” Tessel said. “I’m talking about an actual accounting expert or tax expert or payroll expert.”The platform has also been built to suggest human involvement in “high stakes” decision-making scenarios. AI goes to a certain level, then human experts review and categorize the rest. This provides a level of confidence, according to Tessel. “We actually believe it becomes more needed and more powerful at the right moments,” she said. “The expert still provides things that are unique.”The next step is giving customers the tools to perform next-gen tasks like vibe coding — but with simple architectures to reduce the burden for customers. “What we’re testing is this idea of, you can actually do coding without realizing that that’s what you are doing,” Tessel said. For example, a merchant running a flower shop wants to ensure that they have the right amount of inventory in stock for Mother’s Day. They can vibe code an agent that analyzes previous years’ sales and creates purchase orders where stock is low. That agent could then be instructed to automatically perform that task for future Mother’s Days and other big holidays. Some users will be more sophisticated and want the ability to dive deeper into the technology. “But some just want to express what they want to have happen,” Tessel said. “Because all they want to do is run their business.” Listen to the full podcast to hear about: Why first-party data can create a “moat” for SaaS companies.Why showing AI’s logic matters more than a polished interface.Why 600,000 data points per customer changes what AI can tell you about your business.You can also listen and subscribe to Beyond the Pilot on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

The decline of cable has hurt many stations, which have not only lost viewers, but get less money in carriage fees from the companies that carry their channels.It’s a universe that has shrunk greatly over the past decade.”There are a few ways to view the decline of the pay TV bundle. In our pay TV figures, we exclude vMVPDs, which deliver live TV over the internet. When viewed this way, pay TV will decline 7.2% this year to 66.4 million households. That figure will drop to 54.3 million households by the end of 2026,” eMarketer reported.In 2016, over 90.3 million Americans had traditional cable subscriptions, according to eMarketer.That drop, which is expected to continue, has been devastating for QVC, Inc., the owner of QVC and HSN, the two leading home shopping channels.QVC misses key filing dateHome shopping has always benefited from the size of the cable audience. QVC and HSN have dedicated fans that seek out the channels, while they also sell to casual viewers who when flipping channels happen upon a product they want to buy.A smaller cable universe means fewer customers to capture and that has created financial challenges for the company, some of which it addressed in 10-K filed with the SEC on April 1. The filing, although it was submitted on April 1, 2026, is legitimate and should not be mistaken for an April Fools’ joke.”QVC, Inc. (is unable to file its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025 (the “Form 10-K”) within the prescribed time period without unreasonable effort or expense,” the company shared.That’s no entirely unexpected as the company shared that it was negotiating with its lenders back in February, which was covered by TheStreet.Iconic 39-year-old cable network faces Chapter 11 bankruptcyThose negotiations have continued.”In light of ongoing discussions and negotiations with the company’s lenders and the associated uncertainty related to such discussions, additional time is required for the company to compile and analyze certain information and documentation and finalize certain disclosures required to be included in the Form 10-K, as well as to allow for the review by its independent registered public accounting firm,” it shared in the SEC filing.Based on currently available information, management anticipates it will disclose, in the Form 10-K, that there remains substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern. The Company currently expects to file the Form 10-K as soon as practicable and no later than the fifteenth calendar day following the prescribed due date, in accordance with Rule 12b-25.QVC files doubts it can surviveQVC also issued what’s knows as a “going concern” notice. “A going concern opinion is one of the most serious signals an independent auditor can issue regarding a publicly traded or privately held company’s financial health. This formal communication warns investors and creditors that the company faces a high risk of failure within the near future. It does not mean the company will immediately liquidate, but rather that its ability to continue operations as a viable entity is in substantial doubt,” according to LegalClarity.org.More Bankruptcy:Key auto parts and services company files Chapter 11 bankruptcyKey travel brand files for Chapter 11 bankruptcySelf-driving-car company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protectionThat’s the situation QVC finds itself in.”Based on currently available information, management anticipates it will disclose, in the Form 10-K, that there remains substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” QVC shared in its SEC filing.The company has also seen its credit get downgraded.S&P Global Ratings has downgraded QVC Group Inc. to ’CCC’ from a previous rating, citing increased refinancing risk, and assigned a negative outlook to the company, Investing.com reported.

Younger people have opted to order online and not from home shopping networks.Shutterstock

Blame streaming for cable’s decline”Most Americans (83%) say they watch streaming services, with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video being especially common. Far fewer – 36% – say they currently subscribe to cable or satellite TV at home, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.That has damaged QVC and HSN.”QVC and HSN channels lost almost half of their viewership from 2018 and 2024, a change attributed to less cable and broadcasting use as households transitioned to streaming services and more social media,” Bucksco.Today, a local news outlet serving the Philadelphia area where the company is headquartered reported.The company has ongoing discussions with its lenders, according to Bloomberg.”Television shopping network QVC Group Inc. is huddling with advisers from Evercore Inc. and Kirkland & Ellis to evaluate options to manage some of its more-than-$5 billion of debt, according to people with knowledge of the matter,” Bloomberg reported. A Chapter 11 filing has been discussed, according to a separate Bloomberg story.“QVC Group Inc. is negotiating a voluntary debt restructuring agreement with its creditors that could be implemented as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process, as the television shopping network grapples with viewer declines and a heavy debt burden,” the news organization reported.The consumer exodus from cable, better known as “cord cutting” is not likely to end anytime soon, if ever, according to industry expert and Cord Cutters News owner and reporter Luke Bouma.”For consumers, Cord Cutting 2.0 in 2026 represents liberation. Households can mix and match services — streaming for TV, 5G for internet — tailoring setups to budgets and needs. This diversity fosters innovation, driving down costs and improving quality,” he wrote.Related: Shoe brand once worth $4B closes all stores, avoids bankruptcy