Not only are the companies that unmanned vehicles going to reap huge benefits like AeroVironment (NASDAQ: AVAV), Textron (NYSE: TXT), Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT), and those below, but so are a number of artificial intelligence (AI) companies.

Source: Market Research Reports

As we’ve seen in Ukraine, drones are now a regular part of the battle theater. And drones costing a few hundred dollars are taking out equipment that costs millions.

It’s also important to bear in mind that conflicts, like Ukraine, are instructive for military leaders because it helps them understand how the battlespace is changing with new technologies.

There’s an old saying that militaries prepare for the last war they fought, meaning they often look back to weapons systems rather than looking forward.

Even that old saying is fading.

Last week, Ukraine noted that it will be boosting deployment of ground-based UAVs to help leverage their positions on the front lines against the Russians.

Tere are already many UUAVs (unmanned underwater autonomous vehicles) that have been deployed to make Russia ship travel difficult in the Black Sea.

The newest member of the UUAVs is the Manta Ray by NOC.

The AI component is already being matched with UAVs so that they can make real time decisions given changing circumstances, like weather, geography, countermeasures, etc.

These won’t be put on cheap, disposable UAVs. They’ll be for the next generation of UAV fighters and tactical aircraft, or tanks, helicopters, or submersibles.

The leaders for this next step in defense are also going to give a huge boost to civilian uses, like autonomous vehicles for first responders and regular old people like us.

While a company like Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) is making waves in the AI defense sector, the bigger players are going to be ones that are much more familiar to civilians, like Proffe’s Trend Portfolio 2.0 picks, like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), ASML (NASDAQ: ASML), and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA).