While making serious money from new A.I. products is still a ways off, a quick return to form has given the companies plenty of room to experiment.

In a call with investors on Thursday, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said work on generative A.I. was still in early stages, but “I think it’s going to be transformative, and I think it’s going to transform virtually every customer experience that we know.” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, made similar comments on Thursday. And during recent calls with analysts, Google, Meta and Microsoft also said they would increase investments to support A.I. work.

For tech observers such as Stacy Rasgon, a Bernstein analyst who has covered the chip industry for 15 years, the surge in spending to support the development of A.I. is reminiscent of the investments in servers in the late 1990s and data centers in 2010. Generative A.I. is expected to deliver more than $2 trillion in economic benefits, according to McKinsey, the corporate consultancy, by increasing productivity across a host of businesses.

The A.I. investments could also lift cloud computing sales across tech. The number of customers using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, a tool to build on the generative A.I. models developed by its partner OpenAI, has increased this year to more than 11,000, from 250. Microsoft said A.I. would contribute two percentage points of growth to the Azure business in the current quarter.

“It’s very early, but no one wants to be left behind,” said Gavin Baker, managing partner at Atreides Management, a Boston investment firm with $3.5 billion under management.